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Contrary to much conventional thinking that treats ‘anti-Semitism’ as exclusively a form of ethnic hatred, there is a second kind of attitude that is alleged to be ‘anti-Semitism’ because it is critical, often justifiably so, of Zionism and Israel’s policies and practices. This second type of supposed anti-Semitism is a tactic deployed to discredit critics of Israel by insisting that criticism of Israel and hatred of the Jewish people should not be distinguished. These two distinct types of anti-Semitism actually work at cross purposes, and although there may be situations of overlap, it is a dangerous confusion to lump them together.

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It is rather unusual for even the harshest critics of the behavior of the U.S. Government to be castigated as anti-American except sometimes in the midst of international security crises, but even then such accusations usually reflect the outlook of red neck patriots or extremists who identify with the right wing of American politics. Also, such accusations, although unpleasant, lack the sting of anti-Semitism, which carries with it an implicit secondary allegation of indifference to the Holocaust, to the Nazi genocide, and to the long history of persecution directed at the Jewish people. In my view this labeling of Israel’s critics as ‘anti-Semites’ is a short-sighted form of unsavory state propaganda, generally implemented overseas by hard core Zionist groups, and partly responsible for an emergent backlash that is being expressed by hatred and hostility toward Jews. This is a highly sensitive subject matter that is almost certain to be treated emotionally in a manner shaped by strong ideological alignments for or against the way in which Israel has behaved since its contested establishment in 1948 and in relation to attitudes toward close connections between the Zionist movement and the Jewish people.

Type I anti-Semitism is a form of virulent racism, which is characterized by hatred and envy, and leads to manifold forms of hostility toward Jews. It has been often accompanied by strong governmental and societal support for a punitive response to Jews so as to safeguard the dominant religion and ethnicity, and to uphold the values and traditions of the non-Jewish political community that are supposedly under threat as a result of Jewish activities; historically, Type I anti-Semitism traces its historic roots back to the origins and rise of Christianity, reinforced in later centuries by European restrictions on Jewish ownership of land and permissible habitats that led Jews to focus on money and banking, creating a close relationship between Jews and the rise of capitalism, especially finance capital.

Extreme cases of Type I anti-Semitism involve the capture of state power by an anti-Semitic outlook as exemplified by Hitler’s Germany. It is also relevant to observe that anti-Semitism was relatively rare in the Islamic world, which upheld freedom of worship by religious minorities although claiming a hegemonic role for Islam, especially in the era of the Ottoman caliphate. Until the problems generated by Zionism, anti-Semitism was not a serious issue in the Middle East where Jews in most Arab countries were mostly treated as an authentic religion and a respected minority. Throughout modern history Jews suffered mostly from European anti-Semitism with Russia considered part of Europe.

In Germany the Nazi seizure and abuse of state power led by stages to death camps, genocide on a massive scale, given its distinctive historical status by becoming known as the Holocaust. This genocidal implementation of anti-Semitism was prepared by Nazi ideology and its ruthless and overtly discriminatory practices, which demonized Jews along with the Roma people and others deemed unfit to propagate Aryans, put forward as the master race. Type I anti-Semitism in post-Nazi Christian societies has generally disappeared beneath a thick cloud of guilt and denial related to the past, although mild patterns of societal prejudice persist. These patterns involve a variety of exclusions and discriminations, ranging from informal and unspoken patterns of discrimination in employment and social life to ethnic profiling that calls public attention to unfavorable aspects of physical appearance or behavior attributed to Jews, and includes jokes that perpetuate stereotypic views of ‘the Jew.’ Such societal attitudes are to some extent offset by the widespread recognition of Jewish achievements and influence disproportionate to their small numbers, and the remarkable resilience of the Jewish people over the centuries despite facing many daunting challenges.

Christian Zionism, so-called, is best viewed as an indirect endorsement of Type I anti-Semitism that hides beneath the veil of ardent support for Israel as a state and Zionism as a movement. Its anti-Semitic animus is directed against Diaspora Jewry, deriving from a reading of the Book of Revelations that anticipates that the Second Coming of Jesus will only occur once all Jews have returned to the Jewish state of Israel. To foster this prophetic claim, Christian Zionist favor taking steps to encourage Jews to emigrate to Israel, and in this respect are in accord with the most influential tendency in Zionist thinking. The further anti-Semitic character of Christian Zionism is directed at a subsequent stage of the Last Judgment, a time of reckoning at which all those who have not embraced the Christian faith would be consigned to permanent damnation. Despite these anti-Semitic underpinnings, Israel has officially and existentially bonded with Christian Zionism, giving its organization a diplomatic status and welcoming its unconditional support within the American political scene. This connection between Israel and Christian Zionism typifies a Faustian Bargain, and functions to tip the political balance within the United States even further in an Israeli direction than might otherwise have been the case.

Type II anti-Semitism comes in two very diverse variants. The first variant is what might be called ‘an Arab branding of anti-Semitism,’ taking the form of condemning Jews and the Jewish people for the implanting of a Jewish state in Israel. Anger is also directed at Israel for granting a right of return to all Jews throughout the world while denying every Palestinian any right of return, withholding such a right even from those Palestinians and their descendants who either fled or were expelled from their homes in 1948. This kind of conflation of a state project with the ethnicity of the people involved is unacceptable, and is a form of anti-state propaganda that assumes a hateful form by targeting an ethnicity in addition to a political entity. Most Arabs do not subscribe to such an outlook are careful to draw the distinction between Israel as an illegitimate political phenomenon and Jews as a distinct and geographically dispersed ethnicity. It is important, as well, not to brand Arabs as ‘anti-Semitic’ because some do cross this line of ethnic hatred.

The second expression of Type !! anti-Semitism oddly enough indirectly endorses Arab anti-Semitism by saying that hostility to the state of Israel cannot be distinguished from hostility to the Jewish people. The central contention is that strong criticisms of Israel as a Jewish state or directed at the Zionist Project or expressing sharp disapproval of the policies and practices of Israel are thinly disguised expressions of hatred toward Jews as a people and Judaism as a religion. Proponents of what might be called ‘the Zionist branding of anti-Semitism’ do their best to make people believe that the two types of concern are not properly distinguishable. In this way critics of Israel are denigrated as ‘anti-Semites’ in its authentic sense of hatred of Jews. If Jews themselves become strong and visible critics of Israel they are branded as ‘self-hating Jews’ or simply lumped together with Type I anti-Semites. This is not to deny that some Jews may actually as a matter of deep psychological outlook hate their Jewish identity, and try hard to escape from it, but criticizing Israel and rejecting Zionism should not be used as evidence of such self-hatred. In fact, some anti-Zionists rest their views on strong convictions that Zionism is a betrayal of Jewish values and tradition, and exhibit great pride in their Jewish heritage.

I recall an encounter in Cyprus more than a decade ago with hasbara specialist, Professor Gerald Steinberg of UN Monitor and the Israeli ambassador to Greek Cyprus at a meeting of the Inter-Action Council devoted to conflict resolution in the Middle East. The Inter-Action Council is composed of former heads of state, and I was invited as ‘a resource person.’ This session was on Israel-Palestine was chaired by Helmut Schmidt, the former German Chancellor. In the discussion, the Israeli participants argued strongly that Israel, Zionism, and Jewish identity were a unity, and any criticism directed at one of three perspectives was an attack on the other two. I intervened to say that I strongly dissented from such a view, and felt as a Jew a critical attitude toward both Israel’s behavior and Zionist claims. Afterwards, several participants, including Mr. Schmidt, thanked me for saying what they believed, but told me they were unable to say because they feared that it would be treated as proof of their anti-Semitism. In contrast, Mr. Steinberg was quite hostile after the meeting, informing me in a peremptory manner that my comments were ‘most unhelpful.’

In my view it is most unfortunate to consider criticism of Israel, even if strongly worded unless amounting to hate speech, as tantamount to anti-Semitism. Type II anti-Semitism has several serious undesirable consequences: it conflates a valid repudiation of ethnic hatred with invalid efforts to ethnicize or discredit criticism of Israel and Zionism; It makes many non-Jews believe that if they are critical of Israel they will be unfairly discredited as anti-Semites and Jews are made to fear that they will be regarded as self-hating, thereby inhibiting criticism of Israel and Zionism. For this reason it allows Israel to hide its criminal policies and practices toward the Palestinian people by invoking the memory of the Holocaust and the long history of Jewish victimization, and thereby inhibit criticism. Also, it leads many people to believe that there is no difference between Jewish identity and Zionist solidarity. This fosters a tendency by some non-Jews to regard Jews as an ethno-religious-political category, even if they have no connection with the state of Israel, and hence responsible as a people for the victimization of the Palestinian people. This insistence that Type II anti-Semitism is a genuine form of anti-Semitism actually encourages Type I anti-Semitic behavior. When Arab youth in the banlieux of Paris throw stones at any Jew they can find on the streets of the city the hateful act is based in most instances on their bitter hostility to Israel. It is clear in such behavior that a symbiotic relationship exists between the equally invalid Arab and Zionist efforts to link Israel/Zionism with hatred of Jews.

American popular culture inscribes this confusion. For instance in an early episode of the TV series House of Cards a U.S. senator is completely discredited as a viable candidate for elected office because his opposition found that he was the author of an unsigned editorial in a student newspaper while an undergraduate that criticized building of settlements in the West Bank. Once his authorship was publicized, it was treated as ‘a no brainer’ that his political career was over without any consideration of his age, of the reasonableness of what he had written, and of the supposed openness in a constitutional democracy of diverse views. During the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza this same atmosphere in Washington produced a resolution with 100% backing expressing unreserved support for Israel’s right to defend itself. In polarized America to find such unanimity confirms above all the undeniable success of pro-Israel forces to treat Type II anti-Semitism as synonymous with hatred of Jews. As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have convincingly argued, with ample documentation, this skewing of the political atmosphere has interfered with the rational pursuit of American national interests in the Middle East.

A recent example of such the manipulation of such anti-Semitic allegations has been raised by the case of Steven Salaita recently denied a tenure track appointment at the University of Illinois because he sent several ‘uncivil’ tweets during the July/August military onslaughts on Gaza. The university chancellor, Phyllis Wise, wrongly treated these tweets as evidence of Type I anti-Semitism, although she slyly claims to have acted to protect an atmosphere of civility on the campus, and not because Salaita exhibited anti-Israeli views. Chancellor Wise used this (mis)perception, strongly encouraged by off-campus Zionist pressures and threats relating to funding, to justify denying Salaita an academic appointment that he had accepted and relied upon in good faith. He had rented a house near what he reasonably thought would be his new campus in Urbana-Champlain, and had already resigned his position on the faculty at Virginia Tech University. Salaita had outstanding teaching evaluations at Virginia Tech that included student appreciations of a classroom environment that welcomed all points of view. His scholarship in American Indian Studies had been thoroughly vetted by a lengthy recruiting process at Illinois. The lame justification given by Chancellor Wise and her supporters is that Salaita’s tweets were evidence of a lack of civility in relation to sensitive issues that might make his Jewish students uncomfortable or inhibited. The evidence suggests, on the contrary that Steven Saiaita personally rejected and intensely disapproved of Type I anti-Semitism, although as a Palestinian-American, he was understandably deeply disturbed by Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinian people, and responded emotionally in the midst of the crisis.

I do not claim neutrality on these issues. During the past six years, while serving as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine on behalf of the Human Rights Council, I have been the continuous target of a sustained defamation campaign spearheaded by a Zionist-oriented NGO, UN Watch, based in Geneva. I was repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism, and my views on other issues were likewise distorted to create an impression of bizarre judgment. I was called a supporter of terrorism, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and the like. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles listed me in 2013 as the third most dangerous anti-Semite in the world, ranking just below the Supreme Leader of Iran and the Turkish Prime Minister. Also on their top ten list were such notable authors as Max Blumenthal and Alice Walker. Interestingly, Wiesenthal made no effort to distinguish criticisms of Israel from hatred of Jews by entitling their list “Anti-Semitic, Anti-Israel Slurs,’ mixing the two types of orientation on their list.

Because of the atmosphere in North America where demonstrating 100%+ support for Israel has become an indispensable ingredient of political credibility, these defamatory attacks were accepted as valid by several public officials who never bothered to check with me or examine my actual views on such controversial topics. As a result I was attacked by such luminaries as the UN Secretary General, two U.S. ambassadors to the UN (Susan Rice, Samantha Powers), Foreign Minister of Canada, among others, and a favorite target for Fox TV and the Murdock media empire. Additionally, efforts were made to have my lectures cancelled at universities in various places around the world (including McGill and McMaster in Canada, AUB in Beirut, ANU, Melbourne, and Sydney in Australia, Norfolk in the UK, and Princeton, University of Texas, University of Iowa and others in the USA) These universities were warned that unless my campus appearance was cancelled, funding would suffer. On at least one occasion I was informed that a previous offer of a visiting appointment at an overseas university, Kings College London, was reduced from year-to-year to a single year due to my alleged anti-Semitism. Even my wife was defamed by such Zionist zealots who tried to defeat her candidacy in the UN Human Rights Council in 2014 to become Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food. She was accused of writing inflammatory anti-Israeli tracts in collaboration with me, a complete lie as we had never collaborated on this subject-matter, and it was further alleged that she shared my anti-Semitic views, which is a double lie.

This use of anti-Semitism as an ideological weapon, what is being called here Type II anti-Semitism, is having paradoxical effects, including contributing to new outbreaks of Type I anit-Semitism, the real thing. The logic of this development goes like this—if Jews are expected to be supportive of what Israel is doing to the Palestinians to avoid the label of anti-Semitism, then it becomes reasonable to believe that Jews, and not just the government of Israel, are responsible for the crimes being perpetrated against the Palestinian people. If opponents of anti-Semitism are not allowed to be critical of Israel, despite its drastic departures from morality and law, then there is created a deep confusion between the rejection of ethnic hatred and stereotyping that is an unconditional wrong and the repudiation of immoral and unlawful behavior by a government that is subject to challenge as to the facts and its interpretation of law and morality. More pointedly, if Israel invokes the Holocaust to validate its historic claims of victimhood, and then turns around and victimizes another people in an extreme form first by expelling most of them from their homeland and then coercively occupying the land that remains in Palestinian hands and gradually confiscating the territorial remnant, it does seem to implicate the people as well as the state if opposition is silenced or marginalized. To overlook Israel’s crimes against humanity and genocidal conduct or else stand accused of being an anti-Semite compounds the confusion. It is further compounded by Arab and Islamic extremism that insists that Israel’s wrongdoing is a direct result of its claim to be a Jewish state, and not a normal state.

In conclusion, I believe it is in the interest of both Jews and Palestinians that Type II anti-Semitism be unmasked as a toxic propaganda tool that should be repudiated by people of good will regardless of their ethnicity and political persuasion. Speaking from experience, it is hurtful personally, and generates anger among all those who insist that criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people must be opposed in a vigorous manner. Israel has long devoted major funding and great effort to deflecting blame for its policies and practices by raising the black flag of anti-Semitism to discredit responsible and deserved criticism. As the Palestinian solidarity movement grows across the world, it is obvious that this form of hasbara is failing.

It is no great insight to locate the origins of Western antisemitism in the Church. However, you do not seem to have an historical understanding of how Jews and Christians lived in Arab or Muslim societies under dhimmi law. What is true is that conditions varied in different times and places and that on the whole conditions there were somewhat better than in Europe, which is not saying a lot. Under the vicious Almohads in North Africa, for example, life for non-Muslims was a nightmare. Under the Fatimids in Egypt, there was indeed a degree of tolerance, which I suspect was a function of Fatimid incompetence, which caused them to stay out of their subjects’ lives as long as they paid their taxes. However, under the succeeding Ayyubids the clerics gained ascendancy and intolerance intensified radically. The history of Arab pogroms, massacres, rampages and persecution against Jews in Arab lands is one that I am sure you would not wish to see enumerated here.

Your condemnation of the Law of Return exclusively for Jews is also based on a an extremely skewed view of things. Numerous countries have such a law of return for their own nationals living abroad which excludes national and other minorities. You are also persisting in the error of referring to the Jews as an ethnicity. It is easy to see that you are doing this to delegitimize Israel as a national state. I have spoken of this more than once so I will not repeat myself, but to set your mind at ease and take the air out of your suggestion that it is racism that guides Jewish attitudes toward Arabs in the State of Israel, I will tell you that Jews do not and never have thought of Arabs as belonging to another race but as being a kindred people (often referred to as “the cousins” – “ha-benei dodim” – in Israel). I have pointed out that friction between the two peoples, within Israel as well as in the region, is national and, to the extent that religion is linked to nationality (more so among the Arabs, far less so among the Jews) also religious.

As to your notion that Jews regard all criticism of Israel as antisemitism, I think I have pointed out the distinction between the two more than once but I can see that it is essential to your argument to ignore what has clearly been pointed out to you and to maintain a fiction, as you often do when an unpleasant truth threatens to topple the edifice of anti-Israel rhetoric you so diligently construct in almost every one of your blog entries. I have mentioned once or twice, but will repeat it here, that your argument that there is really no such thing as antisemitic Israel hatred, irrespective of the language used, but only valid criticism of Israel, can also be used to argue that there is no such thing as antisemitism itself, but only valid criticism of Jews.

As I said, “hasbarists notwithstanding”. Fred just can’t seem to help himself. His only role on this blog seems to be to twist every word or idea Richard puts forth out of context and to denigrate him. He provides no valid arguments, only contradictions based on false facts. Otherwise known as lies. He pretends to own the right to interpret history to his own uses, never mind the fact that he misinterprets it. Oh my, it gets so boring. I wish he would keep his word and quit this blog already.

To help you out, Gene, since you are obviously too busy to correct all my lies and false facts, I will do it for you:

1) Life under the Almohads was not a nightmare for the Jews.
2) Life under the Ayyubids was not a nightmare for the Jews.
3) There were no antii-Jewish pogroms and massacres in Arab lands.
4) There were no humiliating dhimmi laws in Arab lands.
5) No other countries in the world have laws of return.
6) Jews in Israel do not consider the Arabs as belonging to the same race.
7) The Arab-Israel conflict is not national or religious.
8) Supporters of Israel regard any and all criticism of Israel as antisemitic, even if they acknowledge that criticism of Israel is valid.

“It is no great insight to locate the origins of Western anti-Semitism in the Church.”

Western Anti-Antisemitism is located in the Church (church-counterfeit in midst of the Church). If you read the Scripture, you will understand without doubt that first generation of the Church faced Anti-Semitism (in Church and outside of the Church) – just read the Epistle to the Church in Corinth and Rome.

In essence, Anti-Antisemitism is Anti-Spirit; it is Anti-Hebrew peoples, and it is Anti-Faith that is authentic (church counterfeit is all of that). Not only church counterfeit, but other counterfeits, as well. It is important to distinguish between Faith’s-authentic and Religion-of-the- faith’s.

For that reason, authentic-Jews now days are so oppressed and discriminated against.

You will notice those now days that “oppression and discrimination” are manifested in forms of “academic and professional discrimination.”

Professor Falk has experienced that to the highest point, and this is why: he represents the essence of the Laws that are spiritual in forms/essence, only different in perspective then Faith in Practice. It is vocation to the Law of the Spirit.

With that, he actually was targeted on the same base as “discrimination against Faiths.” Which, in turn, is in fact Antisemitism: Anti-Spirit; it is Anti-Hebrew peoples, and it is Anti-Faith. What really moves a person? The Faith and /or Spirit, in essence…

I have no doubt that Professor Falk has suffered/experienced a sound Antisemitic discrimination against him—that is exactly what came against him (and his close family) in the form of spiritual attack, and also natural ones.

Now, in order for one to practice things of Anti-Spirit; it is Anti-Hebrew peoples, and it is Anti-Faith – that person must be in no-valid laws of conscience (void of any moral laws) so that that person’s conscience does not apply/respond to reason of a healthy conscience and/or Faith-valid.

Why is that so that a person can not apply/respond reason of a healthy conscience? There are few conditions: 1) seared conscience 2) irrevocable sin’s (personal/generational). It is of sorrowfully unchanging doctrine about the law of the sin/the laws of the sinful nature.

Yes, it is of sorrowfully unchanging doctrine about the law of the sin/the laws of the sinful nature.

People will sin against you, and they will do so blindly and without any yield…and often they will try to impute their sins on to you, and occasionally they will succeed – but they will not do that without judgment and harsh consequence upon their own heads.

Professor Falk has not always wrestled against just some mere humanity in seared conscience . I know this, in fact, solid spiritual and natural attacks are more then that.

If Palestinians are Semites, as they are, and Israel massacres them, at Gaza encloses them in a ghetto, oppresses them and pursues against them a policy of ethnic cleansing – if this is true, as it is true, then we should not say that the real anti-Semites today are the Zionists and the State of Israel?

I think you tried this once. The word semite was coined in the late18th century and refers to speakers of semitic languages. It was not coined as a racial, ethnic, tribal or national term but entered the popular language with “anti-” to refer to Jew haters, that is, people who gratuitously insult Jews in the way that you are doing.

I’m Italian. Are you insulting the Italian story and the Italians if you rightly say that Italy at the time of Mussolini was a fascist state, and the fascists a masnada of delinquents? The shoah has been anti-semitism. Israel, as it is now against the Palestinians, is anti-semite and its people full of delinquents.

Antisemitism consists, among other things, of insulting and gratuitous generalizations about the Jewish people, their history, character and behavior. Calling Israel a fascist state is just stupidity, but I doubt if anyone who is not hostile to Jews would think to call it that. Of course you can call anyone you don’t like a fascist and Seinfeld of course had his soup Nazi. That’s what happens to language when it is used uncritically.

Late Israeli cabinet minister Shulamit Aloni admitted on Democracy Now! a few years ago that the “anti-Semitism” label is used by the Zionists to silence the criticism of the state of Israel.

The Berlin-born Jewish professor Shmuel Almog (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), has claimed that the term with hyphen and without it has different meanings. The term ‘Antisemitism’ was coined by Wilhelm Marr in the 1870s. It was applied to European Christians who hated Jews. However, when it’s written with hyphen ‘Anti-Semitism’ – it means hatred toward Semite people who are found in far greater numbers among Arab Muslims and Christians than the entire world Jewry.

Incidently, professor Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok (University of Wales) who has authored three books on Jew-hatred (The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Christian Antisemitism and Antisemitism: A History and The Paradox of Antisemitism) has always the term without hyphen.

“It is no great insight to locate the origins of Western antisemitism in the Church.”

Everyone looks for a scapegoat, to blame others, excusing and overlooking one’s own faults and sins.

It started in the Genesis, when Adam the Man, blamed God and the Woman for his fall from Grace and separation from God, and the Woman blamed the Serpent. The Blame game goes on to this very Day.

I know Fred will accuse me of Jew hatred for bringing this up from the exclusively Jewish scripture of Leviticus, written long before Christianity and Islam.

This is from the same Jewish Torah Jews use to claim Sovereignty over all the Land Today, notwithstanding there were other Semites already living on the land as the majority, long before the European Jews returned en masse to Palestine after an absence of 3000 years since Israel existed, and 2000 years after the Roman expulsion, long before Jewish-Christians were recognized as such!

God didn’t raise up Islam until after the Christians gained power, inverting and perverting all the Principles of Christ in the process, continuing the traditions of the Old Regime, but with a new face and vestments.

If one studies the Holy Scripture, should this be totally ignored, covered over, and not considered by the Chosen People? What if Christians and Muslims were instruments of the God of the Jews in acting out this from 3500 years ago, since it was recorded for Posterity?

TO BE the People of the Light of God, is Light in a world of Darkness, but it is no light matter.

I am the LORD your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their bondmen; and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright.

But if you will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments;
And if you shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that you will not do all my commandments, but that you break my covenant:
I also will do this to you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.
And I will set my face against you, and you shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and you shall flee when none pursues you.
And if you will not yet for all this hearken to me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.
And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass:
And your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits.
And if you walk contrary to me, and will not hearken to me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.
I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your highways shall be desolate.
And if you will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrary to me;
Then will I also walk contrary to you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.
And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant: and when you are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you; and ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.
And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight: and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied.
And if you will not for all this hearken to me, but walk contrary to me;
Then I will walk contrary to you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins.
And you shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall you eat.
And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.
And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours.
And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it.
And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.
Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lies desolate, and you be in your enemies’ land; even then shall the land rest, and enjoy her sabbaths.
As long as it lies desolate it shall rest; because it did not rest in your sabbaths, when you dwelt upon it.
And upon them that are left alive of you I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursues.
And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursues: and you shall have no power to stand before your enemies.
And youshall perish among the heathen, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.
And they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies’ lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall they pine away with them.

IF they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, with their trespass which they trespassed against me, and that also they have walked contrary to me;
And that I also have walked contrary to them, and have brought them into the land of their enemies; if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity:
Then will I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land.

The land also shall be left of them, and shall enjoy her sabbaths, while she lies desolate without them: and they shall accept of the punishment of their iniquity: because, even because they despised my judgments, and because their soul abhorred my statutes.

And yet for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break my covenant with them: for I am the LORD their God.
But I will for their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the heathen, that I might be their God: I am the LORD.
Leviticus 26
1500 BC

I have to go along with Fred on definitions of anti-Semitism. We all know what we’re talking about when we use it. Please don’t complicate matters.

Ray, your biblical meanderings are a waste of time and effort. We all pretty well know the bible, and delving back into those myths is not helpful. They have nothing to do with the struggle now taking place between Palestine and Israel. Let’s keep to the issues and try to find a way to bring justice and peace for all.

Which Bible are you talking, O’ the Great one! The Old Testament, which late professor Israel Shahak called “the greatest racist religious book” or the New Testament, which Dr. Robert Funk claimed quote Jesus cursing the Hebrews over 100 times.

The issue between Israel and Palestine has nothing to do with Judaism, as far as Muslim Palestinians are concerned. It’s all about the ancestral land stolen by the European Jews, whose leaders have been calling the elimination of Native Muslim and Christian Palestinians since 1948.

Yes Fred, I can read and understand what I read which it seems way too often you can’t.

The 1st mention of Israel comes from the Jewish Book of Genesis when God renamed Jacob. I’ve read of Joseph, Moses, King David, and much about Israel and Jews. My personal reference Bible was printed in 1855 before CanaDa and recreated Israel existed.

Gene and you can keep your heads in the sand and deny the reality Israel is a recreation of the Bible. It doesn’t change the fact temporal Israel is recreated from the Bible and to say the current war with Palestinians has nothing to do with the Bible is wilful blindness!

The justification of Anti-Semitism is a cardinal theme in Theodor Herzl’s book The Jewish State. Herzl poses the question asked by all anti-Zionists: “Will not Zionism provide weapons for the anti-Semites?” He answers: “How so? Because I admit the truth? Because I do not maintain that there are none but excellent men among us.” Then Patai quotes Herzl’s Diaries: “They (Goyim) could not have let themselves be subjected by us in the army, in government, in all of commerce”. However, Zionists have proven Herzl to be wrong. The Jews now do control all those three sectors of the Western world plus the world media.

Chaim Kaplan, who kept a diary during the Warsaw ghetto uprising, wrote his Jew-hating observation: “Every nation, in its time of misfortune, has conspirators who do their work in secret. In our case an entire nation has been raised on conspiracy. With others the conspiracy is political; with us it is religious and national”.

Jonathan Cook writes: Last week, a survey by the Jerusalem Post and Maariv newspapers revealed that 61 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that the Israeli military – but not Israel – had won in Gaza.

“Israel’s defense establishment will recommend to politicians that they show generosity in indirect negotiations with Hamas when discussing the conditions for a permanent cease-fire, in order to forestall renewed hostilities at the end of September. A senior military source has told Haaretz that it is in Israel’s interest to avoid intense social and economic pressure on Gaza. “If we can assist by expanding fishing grounds and easing restrictions on border crossings of people and goods into and from Israel, this will help maintain the quiet,” the source said.”

I have been looking for a You Tube video with original news footage of the 1948 European Jewish invasion of Palestine. One documentary finally appeared Today even including original newsreel, and still pictures from the 1897 Zionist Congress in Basil, tracing the conflict from there.

It has video of the Zionist terrorists operating in Palestine prior to the Israeli Declaration of Independence, doing the preliminary ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in preparation for the recreation of Israel from the Bible after an absence of 3000 years. These Zionist terrorists complemented the Britist in putting down the Arab rebellion prior to the British White Paper of 1938, clarifying and modifying the 1917 Balfour Declaration for a single State solution with proportional representation of Arabs and Jews, the Arabs being the majority living on the Land.

The documentary is 1-1/4 hours long, with visually recorded statements by many Israel’s early terrorist leaders who eventually became Prime Ministers of Israel.

Israel appropriates massive tract of West Bank land
Takeover from five Palestinian villages is biggest West Bank land appropriation in 30 years, says Peace Now; settlers laud Netanyahu, Ya’alon, government.

Professor Mark R. Cohen (Princeton University) in a 2008 article entitled The new Muslim anti-Semitism, wrote: “Jewish-Muslim relations are at a nadir today. But the mutual hatred and anti-semitism on the Muslim side are relatively new phenomena, born out of political, rather than religious factors. When the Islamic Caliphs ruled large swaths of Asia and Africa, their Jewish subjects enjoyed a protected status their brethern in Christian Europe – victims of anti-semitism – never thought possible. Islam and Judaism have much more in common than Judaism has with Christianity.”

I believe that you are accurate based on the fact that so to say “Jewish self-determination” kicked off by 1920 edition.

Arab’s/Jordanians in Holy Land decided on self-determination upon removal of the star to the flag of Jordan – to become Palestinians of Jordan, so to say, in Holy Land.

Lo and behold there is only one spiritual authority in Holy Land, and that would be Old Testament. This is a fact, and as a fact-spiritual will validate against the things that are to be annulled. Meaning, few things are to be annulled based on the standard of judgment that is based on the Old Testament and the author of the Book, alone: the Spirit of God by which substance of the Word was written down by the prophets. Ecclesiastical Laws (canonical in essence) are clean cut to any confusion of the religious.

Let’s look at this in another way in the terms of self-determination: (1) Arab self-determination in Holy Land is null and void (by what)?; (2) Jewish self-determination in Holy Land is null and void (by what?); (3) Returning of Exile Jews to Holy Land and allowing them for entire Holy Land territory without hindrance and baseless restriction would be null and void (by what?).

Did Jews and Muslims uprooted generations of returned exiles in Holy Land and when always? By what authority—yes, so it is, by what authority they did that? Do we ask that?

From the far of beginning, and as much as we can recall – let’s look at it diligently.

Time between 1920 edition and 1947 edition has to be explained, and this is why: time-pass. Time before 1920 has to be explained, and this is why: time-pass. Who did what, and why, and by what authority?

It is true that people can go on and on, but one thing they cannot do is fool way of God, and things that are appointed.

We say that returning of Exile Jews to Holy Land and freedom of Faiths is not to be messed around with by some religious inclinations and abuse and dead-ends of it.

This is what I understand:

They can not play two-state in Holy Land, legitimately. It is Holy Land as one Land and one rule of spiritual authority. Anything else can be allowed, and that with consequences.

i have never agreed with anything much you have commented on here but I can definitely agree with this. but there still exists the problem of ‘submission’ and who will submit first. a conundrum that has almost been exclusively decided by war up until the last half of the 20c.

I do not expect you or anyone else to agree with me, and this is why: I am Church-Charismatic.

It is not about who will but who can.
What is impossible to one it is impossible.
In general we say this: receive what you can, whenever you can and do whatever you want.
It is the principle of “I do not care.”
Spiritual poverty moves me to tears?–just kidding!

If I would care I would teach the Gospel of God (one that is authentic) day and night, and without stop. You see, I am not called to that, and it would be a waste of my life.
However, you may be? But you will say, “Lol”?

David Singer – as a Canadian I’m not surprised that your Israel Hasbara rant found some space on ‘Canada Occupied Press’ – the mouth piece of Zionist lies. May I suggest an object source, whose writer was once called “Dear Friend” by Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.

I believe that you are distracting here from the real problem at hand: “self-determinations and validity of them” toward the Holy Land – that what David is giving reference to, in exact terms when considering this in question: the point of a start? What was the exact starting point, at first? Do we even know that?

I am trying to understand this, and without any error — why? I do not know. However, you are interrupting by the aim to be distracting…

Am I wrong? I do not think that I am wrong because I have specific habits that go against it.

Rest easy rehmat. My article has appeared on many other web sites. Do you want the links?

Instead of attacking Canada Free Press – why don’t you take the opportunity to post a comment on my article on the Canada Free Press web site pointing out what you find objectionable in the article itself?

Here is another earlier article written by me in 2012 critical of Professor Falk’s failure to adopt 1920 as the starting date of the Jewish-Arab conflict – which has direct relevance to my current article in Canada Free Press.

You see, Prof. Falk, how diligently the haters comb the internet for incriminating evidence against Israel, how many hours they are willing to spend each day to “get something” on Israel – videos, blogs, books, articles, links, distorted quotes, anything. Do you really consider this a healthy or normal occupation? I will say this very plainly, Prof. Falk: Nowhere on the face of the earth will you find a country that has been unremittingly attacked in the language used to attack Israel, or at all – not truly genocidal nations like Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Serbia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Turkey; not the world’s worst violators of human rights like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Somalia, Russia, China, North Korea and Cuba; not seizers and occupiers of land like Russia, Armenia, Turkey (Northern Cyprus), Morocco and Azerbaizhan. Where are the BDS movements, Prof. Falk? Where are the blogs? Where are the armies of blog crawlers? Where are the videos? Where are the links? What do you think it is that draws all these “critics” to Israel and nowhere else.?

As for Jews, I personally do not call those who hate Israel antisemites. I would reserve the term for Christians who hate Israel and Jews (one obviously goes with the other) though I prefer the term Israel hater or Jew hater, a term that may also apply to Arabs or Muslims. I also do not call Jews who hate Israel self-hating Jews. If anything, their problem is that they love themselves too much and resent the “demands” a Jewish identity makes on them, but I have spoken about all this already. Leaving aside Jews and non-Jews who criticize Israel legitimately, in the language of criticism, dispassionately, as I might criticize Russia or Turkey or the United States, there are also Jews who are hostile to Israel, like yourself, but to whom I would not think to apply so strong a term as hate. In all cases of antagonism, however, the response is emotional and not rational.

Obviously, when you refer to Israelis as Nazis and accuse them of genocide, you are placing yourself beyond the pale and turning yourself into a pariah and you are going to be attacked by non-Jews as well as Jews in the harshest terms. It is not that your “truth” is too strong to bear. It is that what you are saying is demonstrably false and slanderous, distorted, biased, unfair, and would not be said by anyone who does not bear great animus toward Israel. It is that you are redefining an entire lexicon of legal and commonly understood terms of opprobrium to put Israel in the worst possible light, for reasons best known to yourself.

Accusing someone of genocide and Nazism /racism is universal to all nation as that Nazi-spirit is roaming around many nations (in this point in time), and yes, it is legitimately applied to Israel (without partiality to the any nations in the age of the Church).

Nazi spirit is one of the spirit-principalities of the Beast (Satan / Satan’s horn it is).

I wrote this more in Biblical terms of interpretation — so do not be bewildered to the accusations of the Church-Charismatic — for that is what we understand.

Nazi-spirit is a false spirit, and it is manifested from disorder of counterfeit charismatics (generational sealed / passed on in form of irrevocable sins) and /or blaspheming the Spirit of God and Holy things. (Abuse of the Holy things and orders of Faith that are Holy, in essence).

People will disagree and attack you when you point out their evil nature, legitimately. Otherwise, Professor Falk would be not under harsh spiritual and natural attack while he was at his place of work.

Fred, respectfully, Prof. Falk has already admitted that he is a dogmatist in his approach and fesses up to an occasional lack of good judgment. This does result in his being an extremist in his approach towards Israel. He asserts that you, I and a Rebbe (whose name I will not mention here unless he joins the discussion) are (borderline ?) racists notwithstanding our assertions that Israel is not perfect, that we only point out valid arguments and historical facts which rebut his extremism. And yet it is the good Prof. who invariably joins the ugliest terms of racism with the State of Israel and then tries to hide behind an allegation that type 1 and type 2 types of Antisemitism exist thus intellectually allowing him to distinguish between the two thus allowing type 1 to escape his venom and type 2 to receive the full dose of it.

I recently pointed out to him that in the “real world”, his type 2 attack turns into a type 1 reaction. His Article points that out. This is why I suggest to him that other descriptive words should best be utilized when he discusses Israel. The overwhelming majority of the real world will not go through the “intellectual (?)” exercise of trying to determine which type of Antisemitism he means – it will immediately go to type 1.

His arguments and reasoning of Jews being required to adopt positions avoiding type 2 views in order to not be classified as type 1 are, at best disingenuous. That, in and of itself is an expression of racism.

It appears to me that with each article the Prof. writes, the racist hole just gets deeper for him. So does the imbalance of the approach he takes: Israel can do no right and the Arab no wrong.

To those who believe that the issue with “Palestine” goes back, at best, only a few hundred years, I again recommend that they read Josephus; It goes back at least 2,000 years. As to Jews really not being in the Holy Land much before Zionism, read Mark Twain (when he published under his real name); he mentioned Jews in the land in 1879. We have been there, in greater or lesser numbers, long before the Roman occupation. We returned from the Persian exile in 538 BCE. While we were “cleansed” in Judea by the Romans, we survived in the Galilee and probably in Samaria as well. To say that we have no right to be there and are “invaders” is patently false. Between the early 16th century (except for a few dozen years) up to 1920, this was all owned by the non-Arabic Ottoman Empire which had Jews living there. That Empire agreed, in 1920, that west of the Jordan was to be a homeland for the Jews and east for the Arabs (please see the non-ratified Treaty of Severs – the Ottomans signed it when the land belonged to them and not to the Arabs – it hadn’t belonged to the Arabs for approximately 400 years). In 1920 the owners said to give it to the Jews. The British, who did not own it, did not follow through. So who is the real “Occupier”? And who resorts to racist terms? No Jew/Zionist will become a citizen of any Palestinian State and yet 1.6 million Arabs are citizens of Israel.

There is “the other side” which Prof. Falk and others fail to recognize even exists. And they are, for a good part, the real extremists.

oldguyincolorado: I think you offer a series of thoughtful responses to my attempt to distinguish two distinct conceptions of anti-Semitism. I would
prefer it if you didn’t personalize your assessment of the issues, but I realize that I invited such reactions by discussing my own experience in the post.

My basic point of disagreement is whether someone in my position at the UN or in public writing should use what you describe as ‘extreme’ language in criticizing
Israel’s behavior. I came to the conclusion that the realities of the situation warranted such language as ‘apratheid’ ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘annexation.’ I
refrained from using ‘genocide’ and even ‘genocidal’ for the reasons you advance, although prior to my UN position I had on once occasion pointed to the regime of
collective punishment in Gaza as falling under that label, and was worried that unless Israel’s approach changed, disaster would result. There is increasing evidence
that Hamas used back channels as well as open communication to convey its readiness to behave as a political actor and to uphold long-term peaceful coexistence relations with Israel, including the unanswered letter from Haniya to G.W. Bush in 2006 after the legislative elections in Gaza.

I firmly believe, and this is the core issue, that the realities of Israeli occupation and the wellbeing of Israel and the Jewish tradition and people depend on drawing
the distinction contained in my essay. Where to draw the line is, I agree, a matter of interpretation. For instance, if the correlation between the Israeli occupation policies and systematic discrimination against Palestinians was implausible, then it could be the case that there is an actual anti-Semitic motivation that accounts for the severity of the allegation. I really believe that in the case of persons like myself who have no existential feelings or record of ethnic or racial hatred, or even hostility, to be attacked as ‘an anti-Semite’ or ‘a self-hating Jew’ is at best diversionary, and more likely part of a hasbara tactic to shift attention from the message to the messenger.

What is important is to fit the language to the behavior, and worry less about what the political climate and media in the U.S. or elsewhere views as ‘moderate’ and ‘responsible.’

I have warned about the rise of Jews and Arabs roaming the streets of Jerusalem shouting Death to each other. This makes a mockery of Jerusalem being the City of God’s Peace. The residents, both Jew and Arab have to make it so.

‘Hatred in Jerusalem’

“Ultra-nationalist Jews have perpetrated approximately 50 attacks against Palestinians, murdering one teenage boy and leaving dozens of people injured. Only some of these events were reported. On the eve of the Jewish fast day of Tisha Be’av two attacks were perpetrated against Jews by Palestinians, leaving one dead and six wounded, including one in serious condition. While hatred, violence and racism are not new phenomena in Jerusalem, during the past three months they have consumed the city, threatening to destroy the few sanctuaries of life and sanity still holding on.

Whoever fears baseless hatred between Jews, but does not recognize the damage of hatred beyond the community, is necessarily afflicted by hate. Sinat Hinam is just that – baseless, widespread and ever-expanding.

But hatred does not develop in a void, nor does it feed only upon itself. It is easy to put the onus on extremists and thugs; in reality, its origins can be found much higher up in the social and political establishment. Since 1967, Israeli government policy on Jerusalem has been premised on deep-seated ethnic and national discrimination. Resource distribution and development plans in Jerusalem overtly evidence demographic considerations, leaving Palestinian neighborhoods grossly neglected in terms of planning, infrastructures and services. Racism is embedded in the DNA of life in Jerusalem: in the legal differentiation between Israeli citizens and Palestinian residents, in a public sphere that reflects nothing of the city’s bi-national character, and in a variety of daily practices that deprive and exclude Palestinians……………………………………………

In my view, these developments give credence to Christ’s prophecy: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you that kills the prophets, and stones them which are sent to you, how often would I have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and you would not!
Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.
For I say unto you, You shall not see me henceforth, till you shall say, Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord.
Matthew 23

You are still missing the point, Prof. Falk, and refusing to distinguish between criticism in the language of criticism and criticism in the language of hatred that slides very quickly into gratuitous generalizations about Jewish history, origins, morality and character as well as the cooption of terms generally reserved for Nazi Germany.

The “well-being of Israel and the Jewish tradition and people” does not of course depend on the distinctions you make. The debate between haters or critics of Israel and defenders or supporters of Israel will have very little effect on the resolution of the conflict. Israel is not going to compromise its existence. That should be clear.

I am of course aware that you are called an antisemite and self-hating Jew and understand why. I have explained here why I consider these terms misnomers.

Your use of terms like apartheid and crimes against humanity are simply false and in my view is generated by your hostility to Israel. Hostility there undoubtedly is. I will repeat this as often as I have to: An occupation by definition entails separation between the occupying power and the occupied population and the existence of two different legal systems for occupying and occupied nationals. All separation measures instituted by Israel are solely for purposes of security and it makes absolutely no difference if the Israeli presence in the West Bank is in the form of army bases (certainly legal under an occupation) or settlements (irrespective of their legality). Secondly, international law stipulates how wars are to be fought in built-up areas and there is no evidence that Israel violated these laws despite the high number of Palestinian casualties brought about by Hamas’s implantation of its entire war apparatus in residential neighborhoods.

Once again, your reading of Hamas’s political intentions is naïve, or rather inspired by your will to represent this terrorist organization in a positive light. With all due respect, you are not equipped to evaluate Hamas’s intentions. That is what Israel has an intelligence service for. Knowing what these intentions are requires a little more insight and knowledge than taking their tactical moves and declarations at face value.

Fred, I followed your link mostly because I was born and raised in Montreal and never encountered The Montreal Review before.

Never heard of Einat Wilf and she impresses me as being smart and a “moderate” vis a vis the Palestinians. She is optimistic an accommodation can be reached between Israelis and Palestinians “Perhaps in 50 to 100 years. Nothing immediate. A century from now the odds are very high.100 years.

In my view and assessment, this division must be resolved within the next 3 years, the alternative being Armageddon. I would prefer to be wrong on that projection, but all the Signs of the Times as I see them, indicate that Time line is realistic.

I took particular note of this exchange: DL: The Shin Bet men, among the key enforcers of the military administration, seemed somehow angry at the political authority they served, feeling they had been used in a negative way – as one of them put it, it was tactics without strategy.

EW: I don’t know if you’d call it angry. They knew they were in a situation where they were required to carry out a security mission which was to ensure that the people of Israel were safe and they felt they were doing their job, buying time for the Israeli government to seek a political solution to the problem. There is wide agreement that the solution is political, which is to say it requires a political agreement. The feeling here in Israel is that time was bought but perhaps that time has been squandered. No political solution has been found. As a result the job of the Shin Bet continues without a sense of when it may end.

I also read your long article in the same issue. It reveals another dimension to your personality and interests I have not encountered in this Blog. It takes focus and concentration to comprehend what you are writing.

You wrote, “This is the place, it seems to me, that all of us are seeking. It is that place where all of us come into possession of ourselves and finally come to rest. This is the eternity where all moments are the present moment, eternally expanding into the realm of undisclosed time, and this is the place where the self is fully lived. This self can only be found when it is withdrawn from its idea of itself.”

If I was to provide a brief synopsis of the 5659 words and 32125 characters you employed in conveying your ideas, it would be summed up in these 50 words:
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
Matthew 16

Freedom of speech has its limits. One can not violate someone’s conscience in terms of unyielding Psychological abuse toward a person. Meaning, one cannot impute law of the sin on one’s conscience, legitimately, and especially if someone’s conscience is witnessing against the law of the sin.

Thank you for writing this insightful, eloquent and badly needed essay. Right-wing Israelis and their supporters abroad attempt to portray the Israel/Palestine dispute as a conflict between Jews and anti-Semites. The truth is that some of the most balanced, factually based and humane analyses of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians are written by peace-loving Israeli Jews and their co-religionists abroad. Your essay is a shining example of this reality.

Your treatment of the cartoon incident is typical and revealing of your intentions. I have never before or afterwards ever associated myself with crude anti-Semitic
propaganda. That cartoon was chosen to illustrate the bias of the International Criminal Court from the Google page. It was a rather small overall image I never paid
attention to the dog that exhibited the anti-Semitic content. If I had intended such an impression I would never have denied it or withdrawn it, and it is inserted in
a text about Libya that had nothing to do with Israel or Jews.

Here is the true sequence:

–I was complaining about the bias of ICC, and selected the cartoon for that reason;

–when initially accused my denial was based on complete ignorance, and made innocently;

–as soon as I realized what the allegation was about, I immediately removed the cartoon, not because of the pressure, but because I found it vulgar and anti-Semitic;

–those who wished to attack me, enlarged the cartoon, and acted as if I knew all along as would be the case if what was posted had been observed in the magnified form.

–my apology, which was sincere, was for my carelessness in not scrutinizing the cartoon more carefully when posted. I hope even you realize that I would never knowingly
post such a cartoon, and have tried my best to be careful since then. You may disagree me, of course, but please don’t try to reject what I have to say by distorting
the reality beyond recognition.

The U.N. Human Rights Council reserves a permanent place on its agenda for Israel, ensuring that it will be condemned at every meeting. All other violations in the world are lumped under a separate, non-country-specific agenda item.

The council is stacked with some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, all of whom use the platform to excoriate Israel while scrupulously insulating themselves from criticism. Current members include Congo, Pakistan, and Libya, with Russia, China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia expected to be elected this November. As one former senior member of the Israeli U.N. Mission put it, “When you’ve got regimes like Syria, Zimbabwe and North Korea lecturing you about cultural and economic and human rights, you don’t need a PhD in human rights to understand that there’s something fundamentally wrong.” The problem is not that Israel is blameless or undeserving of scrutiny. It is rather that the international organization empowered with policing human rights spends most of its time prosecuting Jews. Indeed, the body was recognized as so morally bankrupt that Ronan Farrow, former advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, called for it to be abolished–in 2008.

Since you are complaining about the unfairness of the accusations made against you, it seems to me that you would be happy for the opportunity to lay to rest the ones enumerated by Mr. Kelso instead of deleting them: the notorious antisemitic cartoon you posted and then denied posting, the IDF sexual abuse libel, the attempt to implicate Israel in the Syrian genocide. But even if you do not wish to deal with them, I am sure they will help you and your readers understand why you are so frequently attacked.

Conservatives may be the ones voicing the loudest outrage at the hanging of two gay Iranian men—but not because they’ve suddenly become supporters of LGBT human rights.
The tragic hanging of two “sodomites” in Iran may seem, in theory, like an obvious cause for U.S. concern and U.S. action. (Sign a petition! Demand human rights!) Yet in practice, those most attentive to LGBT concerns may be the least eager to pick this fight.

As Nina Strochlic reported in these pages Sunday, the two men, Abdullah Ghavami Chahzanjiru and Salman Ghanbari Chahzanjiri, were hanged in southern Iran on August 6, possibly for consensual sodomy. Their deaths are part of a wave of executions in Iran, with more than 400 in the first half of 2014 alone, according to the NGO Iran Human Rights.

We do not know for certain that they were executed for being gay—one Iranian source says they were, another is vague about their “crimes” but calls them “immoral villains.” If these men were hanged for consensual homosexuality, however, this could be another LGBT headache for the Obama administration, which has been trying to walk a tightrope between LGBT human rights on one end and international politics on the other.

Despite Iran’s state anti-Semitism, the recent arrest of U.S. journalists, and the continued oppression of women, the Obama administration has been attempting a rapprochement with the Iranian regime. Fending off Iran hawks in Congress and the D.C. punditocracy, the administration has argued for a policy of constructive engagement, pursuing diplomacy over military action to halt Iran’s nuclear program. The execution of two gay men, while it may not be surprising, certainly doesn’t make that “engagement” any easier.

Iran’s cooperation also is seen as essential to managing the chaos in Iraq and the Islamic State. With U.S. airstrikes against the Sunni militants, on-off (now definitely off) support of Iraq’s Shiite (ex-)Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the possible disintegration of Iraq, this cooperation—or at least not overt opposition—is surely of more strategic importance than the latest human rights abuse.

Conservatives who favor a hawkish foreign policy will claim otherwise, of course. In the topsy-turvy world that is international LGBT politics, Iran’s record on homosexuality is more a conservative cause than a liberal one. Just a few weeks ago, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on human rights in Iran at which progressives such as Hossein Alizadeh of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission testified about Iran’s hideous record of criminalization and persecution.

But at that same hearing, some of the most vocal defenses of human rights came from Robert George—the intellectual father of the right-wing “religious liberty” movement and, domestically at least, a zealous opponent of LGBT equality—and Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chris Smith, and Ed Royce, who used Iran’s human rights record as evidence against the Obama administration’s policy of engagement.

When Iran persecutes gay people, conservatives in the United States suddenly become enamored of gay rights—and bash the Obama administration for not doing enough to defend them.

To be sure, not allowing gays to marry is hardly the same as putting them to death. And Democrats as well as Republicans routinely criticize Iran’s repression of gays and lesbians. But the fact remains that when Iran persecutes gay people, conservatives in the United States suddenly become enamored of gay rights—and bash the Obama administration for not doing enough to defend them. Thus the administration is hit from all sides—at a moment in which it is trying to pursue its dicey diplomatic agenda.

The phenomenon of invoking LGBT equality as a justification for American foreign policies, which theorist Jasbir Puar calls “homonationalism,” has been around for several years. (Puar might prefer the term “imperialism.”) Even as conservatives fight LGBT equality at home, Puar says, they champion it overseas—as long as it serves their interests to do so.

Moreover, says Puar, Americans frequently impose their own conceptions of sexual and gender identity onto other cultures, stomping out indigenous ways of thinking about sexuality and gender, and perpetuating the myth that sexual diversity is a Western invention. Ironically, by demanding tolerance of “homosexuality,” Americans can inhibit the tolerance of forms of sexuality and gender identity that are long-standing traditions in non-Western culture.

For all these reasons, don’t expect the Obama administration, or the LGBT movement, to raise a hue and cry over this latest travesty of justice. As horrifying as this tragedy is, we might only be able to make it worse.

You are twisting everything. That is unhealthy. You lack decrements of a valid essence. You are discerning is a discerning of a conscience, and culturally bent one, at best.

Muslims are under the Prophesy of the Law — what do you expect of them? Grace? Please excuse me — you do not get Grace by the Prophesy of the Law, just as you get no Grace by the Church judgment by the Gospel and the Law of the Church-Charismatic. It cuts off lawlessness straight into the hell, without compassion. Now this is very harsh. Do you even understand that? Or you are going to twist it, as well as you do not understand it?

Kata Fisher, Hamas began firing rockets at Israel in June, thereby breaking the cease-fire it had agreed to at the end of the last war, in November 2012. The latest war began in earnest on July 7 when Hamas fired some 80 rockets at Israel. “No country can accept rocket fire aimed at civilians,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the next day, “and we support Israel’s right to defend itself against these vicious attacks.”

On July 15 Israel accepted the terms of a cease-fire crafted by Egypt. Hamas violated it by firing 50 rockets at Israel. On July 17 Israel accepted a five-hour humanitarian cease-fire. Hamas violated it again. On July 20 Israel allowed a two-hour medical window in the neighborhood of Shujaiyeh. Hamas violated it.

On July 26 Hamas announced a daylong cease-fire. It then broke its own cease-fire. On July 28 Israel agreed to a cease-fire for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr. The rocket attacks continued.
On Aug. 1 Israel accepted a 72-hour cease-fire proposed by the U.S. Hamas violated it within 90 minutes.

On Aug. 5 Israel agreed to Egypt’s terms for another three-day cease-fire. Hamas violated it several hours before it was set to expire, after Israel announced it would agree to an extension.

The July 15 ceasefire had the same conditions as the ceasefire brokered by the Morsi government. Under those terms, Israel was to provide some relief to the extreme economic blockade of Gaza, which is what the wars of 2008, 2012 and 2014 was all about.

Hamas accepted those terms in 2012 but Israel did not move an inch on relieving the economic blockade of Gaza. Democratic Israel’s ally, the brutal, repressive, Military Dictatorship of Egypt, tightened the screws even tighter, closing down all the tunnels, the only lifeline Gaza had for any economic activity. Since Israel provoked the hostilities, why should Hamas accept the Egyptian July 15 Truce? There was nothing in it for Gaza in 2012 and Hamas would not be suckered again.

From what I have absorbed reading as much as possible as the situation developed, Israel started this war against Hamas in Gaza with it’s Operation Brother’s Keeper that was false to begin with. Shin Bet had no knowledge of a kidnapping plot by Hamas in Gaza. They know everything. This was a rogue operation by West Bank residents.

To completely sabotage any prospect of a Fatah-Hamas Unity Palestinian government, Israel targeted Hamas members in the West Bank, reneging on a deal, massive detentions without charge, house demolitions and the normal IDF abuse of Palestinians knowing full well this would force Hamas to start the rockets again.

Israel broke the unofficial 4 month Truce with Hamas November 5, 2008, with an incursion into Gaza. Hamas retaliated with rockets the next day and Operation Cast Lead commenced

Israel broke the unofficial Truce with Hamas with the targeted assassination of Hamas Military Commander Ahmed Jabari in 2012 while he was engaged secret peace negotiations with Israel‏.

The Israeli government and Hamas knew these discussions were taking place and the draft of a long term Truce, in language acceptable to Israel and Hamas was presented to Jabari.

Just hours after Jabari was presented with the draft, the Israelis killed him with a precision strike on the densely populated streets of Gaza. There was no need for a1000 pound bomb that is GUARANTEED to kill civilians and their homes. It is no secret Israel wants to find the way to have all Palestinians leave Gaza. Destroying their homes with 1000 lb. bombs, and indiscriminate tank shells just aimed in the direction of civilians and their homes is one way to accomplish that goal if only slowly.

In legitimate retaliation to this dastardly duplicitous Israeli action reminiscent of the Jewish Patriarch Levi in his dealings with the indigenous population of Caanan long before Israel the kingdom came into being on the same land described in Genesis 34 of Jewish history. Israel provoked Operation Pillar of Defence and the war, but it’s sophisticated, experienced hasbara units worked overtime to manipulate a compliant Western media and project the lie Hamas started it.

What I find so amazing about Israelis, who pride themselves on how smart they are, yet can be so blind to the way they treat the conquered Palestinians offering mostly token resistance.

I’ve outlined why I believe Israel provoked the 1967 war, confident they could take on the combined Arab armies. And they did it in only 6 Days. That’s how sure they were before they set in motion, the sequence of events leading to the war by their actions April 7, 1967. Israel did fire the 1st shot, starting the war action beyond the words.

If this was true for the Jews of Israel to endure for a month in 1967, IT IS EQUALLY TRUE for the Palestinians of Gaza having to endure an Israeli blockade for all the years 2007-2014.

To detract from the fact Israel started the hostilities, Abba Eban, Israeli Foreign Minister, June 14, 1967 propagated this:

“Wars are not always begun by shots. They are often begun by action and the action which really created the state of war in an acute sense was the imposition of the blockade. To try to murder somebody by strangulation is just as much attempted murder as if you tried to murder him by a shot, and therefore the act of strangulation was the first violent, physical act which had its part in the sequence.”

The youth of the West Bank see no Future with the Status Quo of the 47 year Israeli Military Dictatorship. Human nature being what it is, and as it was for thousands of years, chaos and violence lurks just below the thin veneer we call Civilization as frustration and resentment builds.

There are more and more signs that thin veneer is unravelling everywhere in this world, but especially among Palestinian Youth.

In the West Bank, the illegal Abbas Regime, acting as Israel’s proxy Police in the occupied territories, has delivered no relief from the Israeli Military Dictatorship for two generations of Palestinians. Human nature would cause Palestinian Youth to question the tactic of meek compliance and non-violence.

In Gaza, having endured brutal material privations due to the 7 year itch of the Israeli blockade, younger, different groups of Palestinians, outside the control of Hamas, are now firing rockets into Israel. Continuing the Blockade will exacerbate that to even more extreme behaviours.

The majority population of the Palestinian West Bank, being under 40 have known nothing other that the 47 year, brutal, repressive Israeli Military Dictatorship depriving them of Democratic, Civil and Legal rights.

This is the cost Palestinians must pay to maintain the illusion of Democracy for Jews in the Occupied Territories. It is absolutely unsustainable to maintain that by force of arms.

The only way for that to right itself, is for Jews in Israel accepting Palestinians as fully equal human beings with Jews, with the same human rights and prerogatives.

Only when the smart Spiritual Jews of Israel help bring that Vision into reality, will The Promised Land be revealed by God, and not by force of arms.

Son of man, they that inhabit those wastes of the land of Israel speak, saying, Abraham was one, and he inherited the land: but we are many; the land is given us for inheritance.

Wherefore say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD; You eat with the blood, and lift up your eyes toward your idols, and shed blood: and shall you possess the land?

You stand upon your sword, you work abomination, and you defile every one his neighbour’s wife: and shall you possess the land?
You say thus to them, Thus says the Lord GOD; As I live, surely they that are in the wastes shall fall by the sword, and him that is in the open field will I give to the beasts to be devoured, and they that be in the forts and in the caves shall die of the pestilence.

For I will lay the land most desolate, and the pomp of her strength shall cease; and the mountains of Israel shall be desolate, that none shall pass through.
Then shall they know that I am the LORD, when I have laid the land most desolate because of all their abominations which they have committed.
Ezekiel 33
600 BC

It seems somewhat ironic that on this blog you neglected to tell the entire story.
Ezekiel 34:
“‘For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness. I will bring them back home to their own land of Israel from among the peoples and nations. I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel, in the ravines and in all the settlements in the land.”

You are again undermining your own argument when you quote Eban on the 1967 war. He is saying that a blockade is as much a casus belli as firing shots, and international law agrees with him. In any event, in the case of Jordan and Syria, they did in fact fire the first shots: Syria in shelling Israeli settlements in the months before the war, Jordan in shelling Jewish Jerusalem after being assured by Israel via Gen. Odd Bull and the U.S. State Dept. that Israel would not act against Jordan in any way if it stayed out of the coming war. On the other hand, a blockade in time of war, like the Israeli blockade of Gaza, is perfectly legal.

The only source of the Jabari myth is Gershon Baskin, who was acting in his own name, though he had been involved in the Shalit negotiations. It may well be that he was making proposals to Jabari and it may well be that he was showing them to Israeli officials. However, like you, he had no way of evaluating the responses of Jabari and Hamas, whatever they may have been. It doesn’t take too much intelligence to understand that both sides are continuously engaged in psychological warfare. From Israel’s point of view, the only party equipped to evaluate the intentions of Hamas are the Israeli intelligence services, and if the decision was made to kill Jabari as a legitimate target in his capacity as Hamas’s military leader, it may well be that Israel determined that what he was doing at the time was running around Gaza coordinating rocket attacks and not seriously contemplating a cessation of hostilities. Neither you nor Gershon Baskin are going to be the ones held accountable for Israel’s security, so all this armchair quarterbacking has very little meaning or value.

As far as who was breaking the cease fire in the recent fighting, I doubt if anyone following the news sources that you use would get the impression that it was Israel.

Accepting the truce would have spared a lot of lives – both Jewish and Arab – a lot of people – both Jews and Arabs – from being wounded and traumatised and a lot of property – both Jewish and Arab – from being reduced to rubble.

Gazans have had no say in who rules them for the last seven years. Until they are given the chance to vote they will continue to be cannon fodder at the whim of their Hamas rulers – who subverted billions of dollars of aid intended for Gazans to build a war machine designed to eliminate the State of Israel as set out so clearly in the Hamas Charter.

ray032 lies again.
Ray says.
From what I have absorbed reading as much as possible as the situation developed, Israel started this war against Hamas in Gaza with it’s Operation Brother’s Keeper that was false to begin with. Shin Bet had no knowledge of a kidnapping plot by Hamas in Gaza. They know everything. This was a rogue operation by West Bank residents.

What difference does it make what Hamas said about the kidnapping? The murderers were identified by DNA traces as Hamas activists who had previously been in prison. When mafiosos make a hit, it doesn’t matter if the head mafioso sent them or not, the police start arresting Mafia people. Israel started arresting Hamas people. That’s how you look for murderers. You arrest known associates. What is your problem, ray? Try screaming about Christ on a Gaza streetcorner. We’ll see how long you last. Haaretz articles won’t help you then.

Authentic Islam does not reject Jesus Christ of Nazareth; in fact, they are waiting for his next coming – as I understood from former president of Iran. (I have heard him teaching authentic Islam.)
Do you know what Jesus Christ of Nazareth said about Himself (past, present, future)?
When you know and understand — then teach that.

Your remark is a touchy mock.

Moreover, this is why: Gaza is spiritually excommunicated, along with Israel and Palestine — Christianity-Charismatic mature/authentic is compassionate, but not stupid to go there.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2920683/posts
Hamas Official Ahmad Bahr Preaches for the Annihilation of Jews.
August 10, 2012.
“Oh Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, destroy the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah…kill them all, without leaving a single one.
————————————http://www.mideastweb.org/hamas.htm
The principles of the Hamas are stated in their Covenant. On Hamas charter, it says.Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.
—————————
Mahmoud Al Zahar reveals Hamas’ genocidal agenda – shocking!

Hamas TV Song in Hebrew: Annihilate all the Zionists, Exterminate the Coackroaches’ Nest
July 12, 2014

Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar said Wednesday that a Palestinian state will be established on all of the land of Palestine and not only on parts of it, and that it will include “Jaffa, Lod and Haifa.”

http://www.hvk.org/2001/1201/34.html
Sheikh Muhammed Siyam, a Hamas military leader.
“I’ve been told to restrict or restrain what I say. . . . I hope no one is recording me or taking any pictures, as none are allowed . . . because I’m going to speak the truth to you,” Siyam reportedly said at the conference. “It’s simple. Finish off the Israelis. Kill them all! Exterminate them! No peace ever! Do not bother to talk politics.”

Ray, Hamas will sign a deal only if Israel takes in millions of Arabs, so Jews are a minority in their country and living under Sharia Law.
Sorry Ray, Israel will never do this.

This Hamas agreement is based on the Mohammad – Qureshi tribe agreement. If people are not familiar with this. Mohammad signed a 10 year peace deal with the Qureshi tribe.
Mohammad signed the deal only for Mohammad to use the 10 years to build up his army.
When the peace deal was up, Mohammad invaded the annihilated the Qureshi tribe. This is Hamas plan.

Sorry, but Hamas, Fatah and MR Falk will have to accept Israel as the Jewish state with all of Jerusalem as Israel’s capitol. As Ray knows Jerusalem has only been the Capitol of Israel and was never an Arab Capitol.

I confess to being puzzled by the interplay of different sources of authority to assess and determine rights.
There are matters of reigious authority, historical claims, international law perspectives and each dwells in
a domain of radical indeterminacy, that is, there is no meta authority or decision maker that can tell us which
source of authority takes precedence, and what its application to the interplay of Israeli and Palestinian claims
should be. I have presupposed the primacy of international law and morality as assessed from the vantage point of
the present, which in my view includes skepticism about rights that rest on colonial initiatives. At the same time
I recognize that many others look at a conflict of this sort through historical and religious prisms, and arrive at
very different conclusions. The French philosopher, Derrida, referred to such undecidable situations as ‘aporias,’
counseling the acceptance of responsibility for taking a decision and reflecting as fully as possible on the range
of human consequences of alternative paths of action. I am afraid that is the best we can do. It should at least
encourage humility and a willingness to listen to ‘the other,’ especially the oppressed other.

As reasonable as you sound, you are talking about issues that were legally resolved in the endorsement of the partition plan by the UN. The Jews accepted it, the Arabs rejected it because they wanted everything. Not morally or historically or poltically or legally did they have a right to everything. What they got in the Middle East was almost everything and that should have been enough.

I’m sure that great newspaper reader ray will bring us up to date on the indictments of the Hamas activists, or freedom fighters if you wish, involved in the kidnapping and murder of the three Israeli teenagers and the involvement of Gaza. It should at least teach you that there was a very good reason for the West Bank dragnet cast by Israelii security forces.

You are just mixing everything up to your arguments. You have no base to which you may stick, at all. When you are so to say arguing something the center of your argument should hold/stick – your does not.

The bottom line: unrighteous works and laws lead to strong delusion/s – with that you drift off without some essence of an anchor.

When I was @ LU, I could only shake my head about things that were in my sight. All I could see was overlapping cycles of confusion of theology in application. Your arguments are similar in essence to that due to specific issues you argue – others few as well.

I see it as a form of dead-end theology to the entire issue…

All you have to do is have few key-works and few key-doctrines to your standard.

You just argue for the sake of arguing.

You have to separate assumptions from substance, unless, you see assumptions as to be in form substance, without substance.

You cannot play random chance by laws as factual substance – you have to be aware of assumptions and essence of them, in terms of legitimacy of the laws that should not be random…

I say that you cant excel at something, unless you keep the focus of essence to that something to your reality.

Lets face facts here: If the Palestinians were given the entire planet except for Israel, then they would still be complaining that planet Earth was just one big ‘concentration camp/ghetto’ because the Jews still have Israel.

The “prisms” of ecological and public health provide a scientific –and ethical–“meta-authority” to wisely and heuristically use for problem-solving. These provide a realistic, holistic, objective perspective that circumvents restricted ego- and ethnocentric thinking, which fuel aggressive, superiority-striving behavior. Applying human intelligence toward the apprehension of environmental and community interdependence is crucial to resolving conflicts of reactionary self-interest.

You conveniently forget Hamas won the majority in the Palestinian elections in 2006 all external monitors confirmed was Free, Fair and Democratic. This was in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel was no longer the only Democracy in the Middle East.

Now that Hamas had the Responsibility of governing, Israel and the US-West cut off all financial assistance to the Palestinians so that the Israeli proxy PLA Police could not be paid.

From Haaretz;
Hamas didn’t seize power. It won an election. In January 2006, four months after the last settlers left, Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem chose representatives to the Palestinian Authority’s parliament. (The previous year, they had separately elected Abbas to be the Palestinian Authority’s President).

Hamas won a plurality of the vote – forty-five percent – but because of the PA’s voting system, and Fatah’s idiotic decision to run more than one candidate in several districts, Hamas garnered 58 percent of the seats in parliament.

To the extent Jewish leaders acknowledge that Hamas won an election (as opposed to taking power by force), they usually chalk its victory up to Palestinian enthusiasm for the organization’s 1988 charter, which calls for Israel’s destruction (The president of the New York board of rabbis said recently that anyone who voted for Hamas should be considered a combatant, not a civilian).

But that’s almost certainly not the reason Hamas won. For starters, Hamas didn’t make Israel’s destruction a major theme of its election campaign. In its 2006 campaign manifesto, the group actually fudged the question by saying only that it wanted an “independent state whose capital is Jerusalem” plus fulfillment of the right of return.

Hamas recognized that running against the two state solution was not the best way to win Palestinian votes. The polling bears this out. According to exit polls conducted by the prominent Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, 75 percent of Palestinian voters—and a remarkable 60 percent of Hamas voters—said they supported a Palestinian unity government dedicated to achieving a two state solution.

So why did Hamas win? Because, according to Shikaki, only fifteen percent of voters called the peace process their most important issue. A full two-thirds cited either corruption or law and order. It’s vital to remember that 2006 was the first Palestinian election in more than ten years. During the previous decade, Palestinians had grown increasingly frustrated by Fatah’s unaccountable, lawless and incompetent rule. According to exit polls, 85 percent of voters called Fatah corrupt. Hamas, by contrast, because it had never wielded power and because its charitable arm effectively delivered social services, enjoyed a reputation for competence and honesty.

Hamas won, in other words, for the same reason voters all across the world boot out parties that have grown unresponsive and self-interested after years in power. That’s not just Shikaki’s judgment. It’s also Bill Clinton’s. As Clinton explained in 2009, “a lot of Palestinians were upset that they [Fatah] were not delivering the services. They didn’t think it [Fatah] was an entirely honest operation and a lot of people were going to vote for Hamas not because they wanted terrorist tactics…but because they thought they might get better service, better government…They [also] won because Fatah carelessly and foolishly ran both its slates in too many parliamentary seats.”

This doesn’t change the fact that Hamas’ election confronted Israel and the United States with a serious problem. After its victory, Hamas called for a national unity government with Fatah “for the purpose of ending the occupation and settlements and achieving a complete withdrawal from the lands occupied [by Israel] in 1967, including Jerusalem, so that the region enjoys calm and stability during this phase.”

But those final words—“this phase”—made Israelis understandably skeptical that Hamas had changed its long-term goals. The organization still refused to recognize Israel, and given that Israel had refused to talk to the PLO until it formally accepted Israel’s right to exist in 1993, it’s not surprising that Israel demanded Hamas meet the same standard.

Still, Israel and the U.S. would have been wiser to follow the counsel of former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, who called for Sharon to try to forge a long-term truce with Hamas. Israel could also have pushed Hamas to pledge that if Abbas—who remained PA president—negotiated a deal with Israel, Hamas would accept the will of the Palestinian people as expressed in a referendum, something the group’s leaders have subsequently promised to do.

Instead, the Bush administration—suddenly less enamored of Middle Eastern democracy–pressured Abbas to dissolve the Palestinian parliament and rule by emergency decree. Israel, which also wanted Abbas to defy the election results, withheld the tax and customs revenue it had collected on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf.

Knowing Hamas would resist Abbas’ efforts to annul the election, especially in Gaza, where it was strong on the ground, the Bushies also began urging Abbas’ former national security advisor, a Gazan named Mohammed Dahlan, to seize power in the Strip by force.

As David Rose later detailed in an extraordinary article in Vanity Fair, Condoleezza Rice pushed Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to buy weapons for Dahlan, and for Israel to allow them to enter Gaza. As General Mark Dayton, US security coordinator for the Palestinians, told Dahlan in November 2006, “We also need you to build up your forces in order to take on Hamas.”

Unfortunately for the Bush administration, Dahlan’s forces were weaker than they looked. And when the battle for Gaza began, Hamas won it easily, and brutally. In response, Abbas declared emergency rule in the West Bank.

So yes, members of Hamas did throw their Fatah opponents off rooftops. Some of that may have been payback because Dahlan was widely believed to have overseen the torture of Hamas members in the 1990s. Regardless, in winning the battle for Gaza, Hamas—which had already shed much Israeli blood – shed Palestinian blood too.

But to suggest that Hamas “seized power” – as Jewish leaders often do – ignores the fact that Hamas’ brutal takeover occurred in response to an attempted Fatah coup backed by the United States and Israel. In the words of David Wurmser, who resigned as Dick Cheney’s Middle East advisor a month after Hamas’ takeover, “what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.”

What Israel and the US did at that time was to tell Hamas Democratic ballots don’t count unless we say they do. Israel gave Hamas no other option but violence and created the current situation by it’s political short shortsightedness!

Abbas’ term ended in 2010. As this report confirms, Democratic Israel/US prefers a compliant ruler by decree. He has no political legitimacy except to provide Israel with a proxy Police force to maintain an artificial “quiet” among the repressed Palestinians.

Your lengthy diatribe does not answer this question – why have there been no elections in Gaza since 2006?

Yes – Hamas was elected then – but how can it continue to govern and claim to have a mandate to continue to govern for for last seven years without seeking a vote of confidence from those who elected it?

Three wars in six years fought at great suffering to the people whose welfare and interests Hamas claims to represent are hardly credentials for holding onto power.

The cease fire brokered by Egypt and rejected by Hamas on 16 July directly resulted in the subsequent suffering sustained by Gazans.

Maybe Gazans would still support Hamas – maybe they would not.

When a few of those electors start to voice their disagreement they are dragged out of mosques and publicly executed.

Are hangings and firing squads without trials somehow more humane than beheadings?

No doubt you will raise Egypt and the Moslem Brotherhood and it’s democratic election – only to be overthrown by the military after huge protests by the population. It was obvious that the population realised they had made a big mistake in electing the Moslem Brotherhood and the subsequent electoral victory for Al Sisi.

The key was elector disaffection and subsequent elections.

Hamas is not prepared to put its hold on power to a similar test and the Gazans have been cowed into voicing public protests by acts of extreme violence visited on them if they so much as squeak.

Yes – the PLO is no better – as it clings on to power in the West Bank without holding elections for the last eight years. It too has allowed the summary execution of persons who sell land to Jews. It wants every Jew kicked out of his home to retreat behind the 1948 armistice lines.

Do West Bank Arabs agree with these policies? Have they ever been given the opportunity to express their views?

Amazingly Obama and Kerry still host and wine and dine with Abbas and this fake and illegitimate self- styled “President of the State of Palestine” is received with rapturous applause at the United Nations.

Surely the cause of peace would be better served if Obama and the EU made it clear to both Hamas and the PLO that elections in both Gaza and the West Bank are a necessary precondition to their further involvement – financial and political – in the future of these territories.

What I understand is that Hamas and Palestine rule have lost their legitimacy, and are now more and more shifting toward Islamic dictatorship without any rule of the law instead of Islamic rule of their government.

There has to be election, unless they will declare themselves separate / one Islamic Kingdoms that is based on Holy Quran and International Law, as they keep their King and /or get whomever they want. (This may sound funny—but I am very serious).

They will have to have legitimate elections, very soon in order to confirm the legitimacy of their governments. Until, I only understand that they are in a dead-end with all they are up to, and were this far..

That is fine. At least everyone would know that Gazans fully support the decisions of Hamas that have brought nothing but horrific suffering on the population and wholesale destruction of their houses over the past seven years.

If it is more of the same they want to vote for in pursuit of Hamas’s declared goal of overthrowing Israel – so be it.

Digging tunnels under someone else’s sovereign territory – be it Egypt or Israel – without the knowledge and acquiescence of that State would constitute an unlawful violation of the sovereign integrity of that State and a breach of international law.

Hamas was elected in 2006 but did not manage to gain power in Gaza until 2007 when it ousted the PLO in a bitter internecine struggle.

Both the PLO and Hamas need to go to the polls to determine whether either or both of them or some alternative political party should govern for the next three or four years.

“Both the PLO and Hamas need to go to the polls to determine whether either or both of them or some alternative political party should govern for the next three or four years.”

I find this to be more than just clarifying to the situation.

In addition to this, I am reflecting that people who were detained by Israel may have been taken out without valid reason and at cost for all. What I mean is that their removal alone may have stirred the course o the entire Gaza/Palestine condition.

What are key-individuals that are detained/in prison—what is their status, and what is their record—how long are they imprisoned and why?

If there were secured voting (legit vote) at the polls – would detain persons have the right to their vote on issues in Gaza and Palestine – or that would/can be hindered by Israel (external impact legit/not legit)?

We do understand that in order to get a balanced outcome of the election, all legit votes have to be accounted for.

At least they (Gaza/Palestine) have to elect some sort of transitioning government out of the situation that they are in. They are looking more and more, as radical dictatorship – when people of Gaza and Palestine voted—I do not believe that is what they have wanted to be electing.

However, again, the Charters that are religiously misleading have their strongholds over the people, and lay-people do not understand that– not always.

Now, it is up to the Hamas, PLO, and global leadership to make sure that population gets exactly what population wants—but they can give them legitimate choices/options.

Also, we know that only people have right to choose their strongholds, and just as you said: “Give the people, a say in their own destiny.”

I agree with you, David – that sounds very clear to me; and, this especially if the population is misled by some religious ideology; trapped into some sort of the stronghold.

Can Palestine/Gaza elect people that are in Israeli prison? – Would this be a legit election—one that cannot be hindered by any means?

There are some legitimate questions that have to be answered for people in Palestine/Gaza by global leadership.

Kata, what the Gazans want is freedom. There is no dictatorship in Gaza, except by the Israelis. Palestine had free elections and they voted for Hamas. How can they call for new elections when they are under the iron heel of IDF?

Definition of dictatorship is based on the essence by which killings/oppression administrated take place, and dictatorship in Gaza/Palestine is present (even if administrated against one single person).

I am sure that people of Gaza/Palestine want freedom. However, by what means? Their charters of Hamas/PLO or their perseverance that is legitimate/legal in essence?

We should not ask “how can they” but “why can’t they” call for elections? IDF has nothing to do with the fact whom they want and will elect — they can work with very things that they have.

They need to confirm their existing government/s by valid vote and /or elect new governing to themselves.

Getting things ready for a legit election should not be difficult — or how difficult it would be…and why?

Why won’t Israel let Palestinian Arabs vote? 95% of West Bank Arabs are under full administrative governance of the PLO and 100% of Gazan Arabs under Hamas governance. What have their elections to do with Israel?

Of course both have now had a unity PLO-Hamas government supposedly foisted on them
without having a say. is that fair?

Who cancelled the 2006 vote?

I find the need to continually correct inaccurate and generalised assertions made without any attempt to substantiate them as being par for the course on Professor Falk’s website.

Why can’t you just come out in support of elections in the West Bank and Gaza without trying to throw some dirt on Israel at the same time?

I hope you have read my criticism of Professor Falk’s comments on this very blog claiming Israel is a “special case”

Abbas’ legal term expired long ago. When Hamas won, the US and Israel urged him to dissolve the Palestinian Parliement and rule by “Emergency Decree” In other word’s, Impose a Fatah Dictatorship which still rules as Israel’s proxy police force over Palestinian lives to this Day and Israel, having the economic and military strength, cou;ldn’d even make a Peace deal with their own lackey.

Even Abbas sees the writing on the wall! He can no longer be seen by his own people to be appeasing Israel without delivering anything tangible in terms of personal and economic freedom. For being quiet and non violent, Israel took even more land and now wants to make Hebrew the only official language in Israel. What a way to win friends!!!

And in delusions of victim hood, will believe the Palestinians hate them because they are Jews, not because they are oppressors like they were once oppressed.

What business is it of yours what Israel’s official language is? Have you ever complained that Turkish is the official language of Turkey and that the Kurds have been criminalized for using their own language. Once again you are showing us what a hypocrite you are?

If you have a complaint about Abu Mazen as president, tell Hamas about it. They are the ones who recognized him as president in their supposed reconciliation.

“For being quiet and non violent, Israel took even more land and now wants to make Hebrew the only official language in Israel”

Israel is in occupation of Area C under the Oslo Accords agreed with the PLO. That territory like Areas A and B are disputed between Jews and Arabs. They currently are under the sovereignty of neither.

If Israel decides to make Hebrew the only official language in Israel – it will happen as a result of a democratic vote in the Parliament. I personally would not agree with such a decision and would work to democratically change it – respecting nevertheless the right of the majority view to make it.

That is how democracies work. Those Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank are denied that basic right. That is what you should be seeking to change.

You then state:

“And in delusions of victim hood, will believe the Palestinians hate them because they are Jews, not because they are oppressors like they were once oppressed.”

Do the Palestinian Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank hate the Jews? Their political leaders certainly do. That hatred is expressed in the PLO Covenant and the Hamas Charter.

There is no objection as Palestinian Arabs build a new city – Rawabi – the first Palestinian planned city in the West Bank – located near Birzeit and Ramallah. A master plan has been drawn up for the city, which will consist of 10,000 homes in six neighborhoods with a population of 40,000.

Yet Hamas and the PLO go ballistic when Israel does the same thing by expanding existing settlements in Area C by proposing the addition of a fraction of the housing units being built in Areas A and B?

What is ok for Arabs is apparently not ok for Jews. That is Jew-hatred.

Time to find out if the people they rule with iron fists still agree with their leaders openly declared and undisguised Jew-hatred.

It is a polemical absurdity to compare the Palestinians living in Gaza under conditions of blockade and occupation, and in the WB
under conditions of occupation, with the conditions in Israel that exists under conditions of relative normalcy, and to relate the
expectations about democracy in Israel versus Palestine as suggesting the presence of “Jew-hatred.” I notice you refer to ‘Arabs’
not ‘Palestinians,’ which is one more indication of the extremity of your views.

With the greatest respect the polemical absurdity is your use of the term “Palestinians ” which was not defined until 1967 in the PLO Charter.

There were no “Palestinians” mentioned in 1922 in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine – only ” the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine ” – nor in the UN 1947 Partition Plan – only “Jewish State” and “Arab State”.

I used the term “Palestinian Arabs” – which I believe is the proper and appropriate term- twice in the response to which you objected. I used the term “Arabs and Jews” twice to signify what the conflict is and has always been about for the last 100 years.

Of course you want to bury all that history – as do the PLO and Hamas.

It is you Professor who holds and follows the extremist views of the PLO and Hamas who do not accept that Jews have the legal right to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in Palestine under the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the UN charter.

You mention the term “occupation” – which is defined by the ICRC as follows:

“Under IHL, there is occupation when a State exercises an unconsented-to effective control over a territory on which it has no sovereign title. Article 42 of The Hague Regulations of 1907 defines occupation as follows: “Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.”

Your claim that Gaza is under occupation is clearly unsustainable. Similarly Areas A and B of the West Bank are not occupied.

You are parroting and adopting the language of the PLO and Hamas – and you accuse me of having extremist views?

It is your prerogative to choose their language of violence and rejection – but don’t accuse me of extremism in a one-line unsubstantiated throwaway sentence.

The best way to restore normalcy in Gaza is to stop firing rockets indiscriminately into Israeli civilian population centers, stop using mosques and schools as launching pads, end the use of human shields and live like a neighbour – not an enemy sworn to wiping out your neighbour.

Do you support elections being called in Gaza and Area A and Area B of the West Bank after a lapse of eight years – Yes or No?

Apropos your claim that Israel is a “special case” deserving of special treatment in the media not extended to countries like Syria, Iraq, Sudan and Nigeria – do you intend responding to my article – to which I have previously drawn your attention:

Are you mocking David or are you indicating that he missed his calling? I doubt that he has missed his calling.
David is exile Jew by Faith and line ancestral. I just know that by Spirit. Now, he may not have all answers/ all things just right for you –but his way of thinking is crisp-clean. I have not seen/picked up any other spirits to him, and I only hear that what he says in Spirit. (If you are up to judge—let me help you at it).
You may like to reflect on this fact:
My ancestor was Arab—I can’t call his ancestor line anything then “Arab” –I am not Arab, ethnically, because of the diversity of the ethnicity in my family line. This is why I do not resemble Arab ethnicity…maybe 5%.
You could give a reference to my ancestor as “Bosnian Arab” – but I am not “nation of Arabs” as he was “Nation of Arabs.” Now, if I would be a Muslim by Faith and practice – I would be “Nation of Arabs.” Or would I not be—that—in fact, would be my entitlement? The Jewish girl that married Muslim boy in Israel few weeks ago and has converted to Islam by marriage –was automatically by that marriage (not only conversion to the Faith) of the nation of Arabs (and perhaps the nation of exile-Jews due to Jewish line of her Muslim husband).
It is written that “Abrahamic line after Hagar /Arabs will be a great nation. We now also know that they are intermixed with tribes of Jacob-exiles.
How do you look at contemporarily Jews, then?
Likewise with Jews: Their ancestor’s line lines may point to European Khazarian Turks; however, they are “Nation of Jews” by the grafting into Judaism (as Faith). Now, religious heresies are separate issues and are also to be evaluated separately. Judaism as Faith does not expire as some works of the Law have expired while others have not—the Law itself has not expired. However, Judaism, as Faith is binding to the “Nation of the Jews.” Let’s be clear about that.
Lay people will do whatever they want—and for that reason you have someone like David, who may be able just by whatever to correct what lay people are doing and have done in the past (both Palestinian-Arabs/Gazan-Arabs and Jews in Holy Land).
Let’s not delude ourselves as lay-people but submit in clear conscience, and for this reason: Exile-Jews worldwide have to be allowed freely into the Holy Land.
Who are you to say that Israel as a “state” is not preparing the way to that very work and the fact? Anyone else?
Let’s discern stuff to our day – but let’s do it in a clear conscience, and crisp-clean discerning that is corporate, in essence. I think and also believe that Vatican/Rome priesthood, who is Charismatic priesthood could do this for us and that without difficulty – but only few of them. I am sure of that. Compared to them, and their spiritual ability I am and would be a pooping babe—I am not foolish to be prideful. Are you?

If you were an Arab, rehmat, I would understand your hatred of Jews and Israel, but I have the feeling that you are an Indian or Pakistani Muslim. If that is the case your ancestors were raped, murdered and forced to convert by the conquering Arabs, so it’s hard for me to understand your sympathies. If, on the other hand, you are a conquering Arab, then I understand you perfectly, though it’s possible to hate without the absurdities. You only make yourself look like a fool.

David, thank you for causing me to research your comment. Now I have more quick reference info for my Library.

Want to discuss which of the main rules listed below Israel violates with impunity? Israel violates 8 of the 15 rules with little doubt, and the remainder can be argued.

The duties of the occupying power are spelled out primarily in the 1907 Hague Regulations (arts 42-56) and the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV, art. 27-34 and 47-78), as well as in certain provisions of Additional Protocol I and customary international humanitarian law.

Agreements concluded between the occupying power and the local authorities cannot deprive the population of occupied territory of the protection afforded by international humanitarian law (GC IV, art. 47) and protected persons themselves can in no circumstances renounce their rights (GC IV, art. 8).

The main rules o f the law applicable in case of occupation state that:

1. The occupant does not acquire sovereignty over the territory.

2. Occupation is only a temporary situation, and the rights of the occupant are limited to the extent of that period.

3. The occupying power must respect the laws in force in the occupied territory, unless they constitute a threat to its security or an obstacle to the application of the international law of occupation.

4. The occupying power must take measures to restore and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.

5. To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the occupying power must ensure sufficient hygiene and public health standards, as well as the provision of food and medical care to the population under occupation.

6. The population in occupied territory cannot be forced to enlist in the occupier’s armed forces.

7. Collective or individual forcible transfers of population from and within the occupied territory are prohibited.

8. Transfers of the civilian population of the occupying power into the occupied territory, regardless whether forcible or voluntary, are prohibited.

9. Collective punishment is prohibited.

10. The taking of hostages is prohibited.

11. Reprisals against protected persons or their property are prohibited.

12. The confiscation of private property by the occupant is prohibited.

13. The destruction or seizure of enemy property is prohibited, unless absolutely required by military necessity during the conduct of hostilities.

14. Cultural property must be respected.

15. People accused of criminal offences shall be provided with proceedings respecting internationally recognized judicial guarantees (for example, they must be informed of the reason for their arrest, charged with a specific offence and given a fair trial as quickly as possible).

What you don’t understand. ray, is that the West Bamk doesn’t belong to anyone. No one is the sovereign there. The Partition Plan gave it to the Arabs. The Arabs said we want evertthing or nothing. Then the Jordanians annexed it illegally, So exactly whose land in being occupied? As for Israel’s violations, the only arguable paragraphs concern the settlements, administrative detention (sanctioned by British Mandate law) amd the annexation of East Jerusalem, which no one recognizes in any case and serves the Arabs right after they violated the armistice agreements and didn’t allpw Israelis access to the Western Wall for 20 years..

What you don’t understand, Fred, is there was already a majority of Arabs living on the land of Palestine before the Zionist terrorists actively prepared the way for the European Jewish invasion.

When the British finally recognized the folly within the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1938 What Paper was intended to correct that folly, but it was too late.

The Zionist terrorists who worked with the British to suppress the indigenous Palestinian population uprising to British Colonial rule prior to that 1938 White Paper, turned against the British with that policy change.

You’re talking nonsense again. There wasn’t a European Jewish invasion. There was only an Arab invasion in the 7th century. Jews purchased land legally with Ottoman consent and Jews sought sovereignty in a tiny part of the Middle East, which the UN granted to them.

I think, ray, you ate expending a little more venom than is normal or healthy in villifying the Jews. I’ll be happy to go around in circles with you for another turn or two but only if you explain to me why you didn’t open your mouth when Jewish women and children were being blown apart by Arab suicide bombers.

I note you fail to deal with my reply which makes it clear that Israel does not occupy Gaza or areas A and B.

I repeat for your edification what I told Professor Falk:

“You mention the term “occupation” – which is defined by the ICRC as follows:

“Under IHL, there is occupation when a State exercises an unconsented-to effective control over a territory on which it has no sovereign title. Article 42 of The Hague Regulations of 1907 defines occupation as follows: “Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.”

Your claim that Gaza is under occupation is clearly unsustainable. Similarly Areas A and B of the West Bank are not occupied.”

““Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.”

Are you blind? What do you think 2008, 2012 and the current Truce over Gaza. Israel controls the land, sea and air of Gaza. That’s under the control of the hostile IDF. You are denying the reality of the situation.

Read the legal definition of “occupation” closely again and hopefully you may understand your claim has no validity.

There is a huge difference between “occupation” and taking steps to prevent or terminate hostile activities against a member state of the United Nations emanating from neighbouring territory.either of another member State of the United Nations or any other entity.

The inherent right of self defence is written into article 51 of the UN Charter.

The ‘inherent right of self-defense’ is notoriously contested by law experts with different viewpoints. To say the least
it is inappropriate to claim clarity for an application of international law that goes against the weight of expert opinion as
in your views of ‘occupation.’ Within the UN, for instance, it is taken as established that the WB, East Jerusalem, and Gaza
are ‘occupied,’ and subject to the 4th Geneva Convention. Only Israel and its most ardent supporters argue otherwise. Even the
US Government does not endorse Israel’s claims on these matters of interpreting international law.

You are engaging in double-talk, Prof. Falk. It is universally understood and agreed that if someone tries to kill you, you have the right to defend yourself. It is also illogical to call Gaza occupied after Israel did precisely what it was asked to do and withdrew its forces from Gaza, leaving its border with Egypt and the sea entirely open until Hamas engaged in acts of war and Israel instituted a legal siege and blockade. This is all the more reason for Israel not to withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank as demanded by people like yourself.

Your (mis)construction of the facts and law is stunning. As if Israel was a passive bystander after its ‘disengagement’ in 2005.
It controlled all the crossings, including the one to Egypt (working in tandem with Egyptian intelligence even after Mubarak was
overthrown). The right of self-defense in international law is carefully circumscribed, perhaps so much so that a country such as
Israel has a reasonable basis in some circumstances for invoking it. The recent attacks do not in my mind qualify as ‘self-defense’
in any plausible manner. First, Israel provoked Hamas by a number of actions. Secondly, it had alternatives, including living the
blockade, agreeing on a long-term truce. Thirdly, it had no basis in law for such a grossly disproportionate use of force with such
a high incidence of civilian casualties. Consider the ratio of civilians to military killed on both sides, and then ask yourself fairly,
‘Which side is guilty of ‘terrorism’?

I am sorry, Prof. Falk, but you are constructing an Alice in Wonderland argument, and we have been through this a dozen times. Hamas fired rockets at Israel’s civilian population and Israel returned the fire. The police actions taken by Israel in the West Bank to round up Hamas activists after the murders was perfectly legitimate – and certainly so given the results – and in any case does not justify firing 3,500 rockets at Israel’s population centers and violating or refusing to accept every cease fire. Furthermore since all the force used by Israel did not succeed in stopping the rocket fire, it can hardly be called disproportionate. The higher casualties suffered by the Palestinians as such is irrelevant. It is in the nature of war that the winning side will suffer fewer casualties than the losing side. Israel cannot be penalized for knowing how to protect its population. Hamas should be penalized for endangering its population. You are perfectly aware of why Palestinian civilians were killed and injured after Hamas turned their neighborhoods into a war zone and you are perfectly aware of the measures Israel took to avoid the inevitable casualties. You are also aware that the blockade is there to prevent the importation of war materials, which Hamas would not hesitate to import if it was allowed to.

You seem to think that terrorism is a legitimate means to attain political ends. Not too many people, legal experts or otherwise, agree with you.

There is no reasoning with Fred Skolnik (nor his fellow hasbarists). He persists in following Goebbels’ philosophy that if you tell a big enough lie for a long enough time, eventually people will believe it. Well, I’m glad that most honest people have seen through this and are no longer willing to be fooled by it. We have seen that the emperor wears no clothes.

It’s strange, Fred, that I have never seen where you condemn the yishuv for using terrorist tactics in the creation of Israel. I suppose, in your eyes, it was legitimate then, but not now. “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”

The Yishuv did not use terrorist tactics but condemned them in the splinter groups like Lehi and Etzel. The entire Arab world celebrates terror and your Palestinians were dancing in the streets when the Twin Towers fell.

Yes, I am too busy. But you seem to have a full time job twisting the facts. You also ignore the two Palestinian teenagers who were shot in the back in cold blood, prior to the alleged kidnapping, or the firing of rockets.

The yishuv did not condemn the Irgun for its terrorism. The worst of the terrorist murderers, Begin and Shamir, even became PRIME MINISTERS!

I didn’t see any Palestinians, maybe a few Saudis, dancing in the streets. But I did see pictures of Israelis across the way in New Jersey celebrating. They were arrested, and quietly shipped back to Israel without fan fare.

If Arafat and Abu Mazen were rehabilitated and recognized by Israel as the legitimate leaders of the Palestinians, why shouldn’t Begin and Shamir become prime ministers?

Hamas didn’t start firing rockets because of anything that happened before the kidnappings but ostensibly because Israel started arresting Hamas activists in the West Bank in order to find the murderers. But the real reason Hamas got into this round of fighting was to regain its falling prestige. That’s what the analysts are saying. They could be wrong of course. I’m sure you’re better informed from watching television and referencing blogs.

Sorry for reading you again Fred, but actually you have given us a good idea for a solution to this situation. Given the crisis of bankruptcy in Detroit (where I was born), it might be a good idea to move Israel to that city and resettle it. Just think of all that Jewish money rebuilding that city. Hell, most of it comes from the US, anyway.

You won’t believe it, but most of my information comes not from TV or blogs, rather from sources in Israel and Palestine. As they used to say in Germany, “Ve haf vehs”.

Since you are obviously too busy to enumerate all my lies, I will help you out and do it for you:

1. Hamas terrorists did not murder three Israeli teenagers.
2. Israel’s security forces did not arrest the Hamas people who helped them following their manhunt in the West Bank.
3. Israel’s security forces did not also arrest 100 Hamas terrorists with their entire arsenal who were planning terrorist attacks in Israel and planning to overthrow Abu Mazen.
4. Hamas did not fire 3,500 rockets at Israeli population centers.
5. Hamas did not violate or refuse to observe 6 cease fires proposed by Egypt.
6. Hamas did not embed its entire military apparatus in residential areas, including command posts and attack tunnels leading toward Israeli civilian settlements.
7. Hamas did not manufacture, store and fire its rockets from in and around hospitals, clinics, schools, playgrounds, mosques, private homes and apartment buildings
8. Israel did not warn Gaza’s civilian population of impending attacks through leaflets dropped from the air, telephone calls and emails.

Rogue elements in the occupied West Bank may have kidnapped those boys, but it was not directed by the Hamas leadership in Gaza. It has come out the Head of Mossad told Israel’s 1% in a private meeting he undertakes 1000+ operations a month or 33 a Day every month. You yourself have posted Shin Bet has intercepted many planned abductions, but were left in the dark about this one. It was locally planned. How stupid were those kidnappers, who kidnap to exchange for Palestinians kidnapped by the government of Israel and detained without charge and kill them for nothing? And to bury the bodies on their own recently bought land? Not a professional operation at all. Three teenagers sitting in the back seat of a stolen car and because the kidnappers weren’t watching them, were able to make a 2 minute phone call to say they were kidnapped? Too many questions that you never answer Fred?

2. Israel’s security forces did not arrest the Hamas people who helped them following their manhunt in the West Bank.

Israel’s security services detained/kidnapped without charge, over 600 Palestinians in a broad sweep of the Hebron area, like declaring war on Hamas, in their ‘Brother’s Keeper’ Operation, to contrast even more sharply with my article ‘AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER’ of November 30, 2013. In addition, they killed 6 Palestinians in the process even before the murderous bombardment of the people in Israel’s Gaza Ghetto.

3. Israel’s security forces did not also arrest 100 Hamas terrorists with their entire arsenal who were planning terrorist attacks in Israel and planning to overthrow Abu Mazen.

That is an unsubstantiated claim with no proof offered. Hamas had already agreed to Abbas and Fatah having the predominant role in transition to Palestinian Unity, and that made Netanyahu go ballistic. If Netanyahu couldn’t make Peace with non-violent lackey Abbas and the West Bank, Palestinians speaking with one voice would be seriously problematic for Israel.

4. Hamas did not fire 3,500 rockets at Israeli population centers.

Israel already had the “Protective Edge” with the Iron Dome system as all the facts and figures confirm. There is no denying this was a nuisance to Israelis, but hardly life threatening unless it was a direct hit which was most unlikely. Israeli tanks firing shells into Palestinian homes were just as indiscriminate as the home made rockets, not to mention the 7,000 + big bombs Israel dropped on the prisoners of Gaza designed not for surgical strikes as Israel has shown in the past it is capable of doing, but designed to kill, maim and displace civilians in a slower method of ethnic cleansing.

5. Hamas did not violate or refuse to observe 6 cease fires proposed by Egypt.

Hamas is aware of the close association between the Israeli Military Dictatorship in the West Bank and the Military Dictators in Egypt. The last ceasefire of 2012 led Hamas to believe Israel would let up on the crushing economic blockade of Gaza preventing any kind of economy developing there. In the latest carnage Israel inflicted on Gaza, many of the few remaining businesses were bombed out of existence.

Instead of any relief, the Israeli Dictatorship got the Egyptian Dictatorship to tighten the screws even tighter, closing all the tunnels, the only economic lifeline Gaza had to the outside world. Why should Hamas accept the same kind of Truce? That would benefit Israel, but not the people of Gaza. The current Truce is agreed to last only until the end of this month. If there is no relief for Gaza from the Blockade, ????????

6. Hamas did not embed its entire military apparatus in residential areas, including command posts and attack tunnels leading toward Israeli civilian settlements.

This is War in the absence of any Good Faith Peace Agreement and this war has been going on since 1948. It was no secret Hamas knew how to dig tunnels. Go to Google images and you can see cattle, sheep, cars, all kinds of civilian use merchandise moved through tunnels, and obviously some real missiles that did not appear before. Why Israelis are so shocked about the tunnels is beyond me. Israeli media always refer to them as terror tunnels and say they were dug to kill Israeli civilians. I previously asked you to give me a link to a report of an attack on Israeli civilians through these tunnels. It seems to me Hamas has learned from 2012 and used the tunnels to kill only soldiers and the figures back that perception up.

7. Hamas did not manufacture, store and fire its rockets from in and around hospitals, clinics, schools, playgrounds, mosques, private homes and apartment buildings

When Civilian deaths were 80% of all those killed, despite Israeli denials, the militants were the collateral damage. The 1000 lb. bombs were dropped in full knowledge civilians and their civilian housing would be destroyed. Israel is capable of precise targeting and has proved it to the world many times in their targeted assassinations on the densely populated streets of Gaza.

8. Israel did not warn Gaza’s civilian population of impending attacks through leaflets
dropped from the air, telephone calls and emails.

This is a placebo to placate the notion of having a good conscience. This was posted August 2 in the article Poetry and War. Those warnings were meaningless. Israel warned civilians to get out of their homes and then bombed those war refugees where they were seeking sanctuary.

Poem from Gaza: You have 58 seconds to run

They call us now.
Before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think “Do I know any Davids in Gaza?”
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

You are ranting again. I’m sorry to have chased you all over the Internet frantically looking for incriminating evidence, but until you answer my question you’ll be talking to yourself: Why didn’t you open your mouth when Jewish women and children were being blown apart and murdered in their homes by Arab terrorists? You are a hypoctite and fake.

8. Israel did not warn Gaza’s civilian population of impending attacks through leaflets
dropped from the air, telephone calls and emails.

This is a placebo to placate the notion of having a good conscience. This was posted August 2 in the article Poetry and War. Those warnings were meaningless. Israel warned civilians to get out of their homes and then bombed those war refugees where they were seeking sanctuary.

I was thinking, too, that “telephone calls and emails” as warning to the Gaza’s civilian population is very bizarre in practice. If Israel has means of stopping rockets from Gaza — why then shooting back? I mean, really, — if they really do not want casualties-civilian.

I am sure that someone can give me at least ten reasons why to shoot back at those rockets—but can anyone give two reasons why Israel should not?

Not Literary they are killing civilians, but Hamas? – as they literary want to stop Hamas, and actually don’t by anything else then stopping rockets…but why the killing of civilians, instead?

To stop Hamas is to stop them by targeting specific areas? How and why?

I do not think that I am twisting anything here…

What is their strategy? Stop the rockets and kill Hamas—or stop rockets and kill civilians—get as many rubble’s as you can so that be easier to move on into desired areas – as civilians are not going to hang out in the rubble’s?

Is it not Israelis strategy in effect?
If not what then?

For every areas/ town that Israel blows up they get sanctions that are appropriate.

Build luxurious refugee camps — just next to these rubbles, the population stays.

Refuge camps need to be built just on locations where Israel wants strategically to shoot around and to move in — there you move in Designated Refugee Camps that are excellent in structure /architecture, and you can move in any refugees (from any Arab Land). Moreover, you start planting economy and thereafter community around and about it.

I came across this, too, and I think it is just reliable interpretation of a research…that may explain why such authentic Antisemitism in blood-lines.

I was not surprised about blood-lines that point to ancient Rome in Jewish converts and /or illicit Jewish marriages with ancient Rome, and I believe that this is Biblical-significant to the interpretation of the end times to the Church, as well.

I feel this research is an important based on a question: Does this mean that if the “Zionist state of Israel” (only one line of Jewish converts/community– so to say) is “stripped off Emperor” — the Babylon (of the end times is also).

It seems that “Babylon” so to say is a specific tribe, only. One among all other Jewish tribes that does not graft in? Am I wrong? And how would you go about grafting them in? About this, too, I do wonder.

This is what I have understood based on the Scripture — but the prophets will have to look into the Scripture and explain the Sacred Texts.

Is the “Zionist Israel state” based on that one tribe the Babylon itself– the one of the End Times?

I find your generalised and unsubstantiated response once again very frustrating.

Don’t member nations of the UN have the inherent right of self defence – although this is clearly stated in article 51 of the Charter?

Name five “law experts” who disagree and give us the links to the articles written by them – so we can have a meaningful discussion.

Refer us to five “expert opinions” that claim Gaza and Areas A and B of the West Bank are under “occupation” – so we can again discuss their opinions.

Citing the UN is not good enough. That organization could not even put together a proper brief to the International Court of Justice when it sought its advisory opinion on the construction of Israel’s Security barrier.

The UN continues to make pronouncements on the illegality of Jewish settlement in the West Bank without any regard to article 80 of its own Charter.

The same UN talks about “Occupied Palestinian Territory” when the issue of ownership of that territory remains unresolved and has so remain unresolved since 1948.

I am still awaiting your response to my detailed criticism of your reasons for treating Israel as a “special case” as detailed in my following article:

With all due respect, you are not interested in these issues, but in advancing dogmatic and unwavering positions that support Israel no matter what the facts & law.

Of course, every sovereign state enjoys the inherent right of self-defense. No competent person would dispute that. The only question worth discussing is whether Israel
claim fits the realities of the situation when it launched the attack on Gaza on July 8th. There are uncertainties about the interpretation in such a setting: read the rest of Article 51 if you wish to be serious about the complexities involved: did a prior armed attack occur? rockets that cause no casualties will strike many international law
experts as insufficient. Was Israel itself partly responsible for the rockets fired in retaliation for its unlawful provocations that included air strikes on Gaza targets?
Did Israel, as required by Article 51, immediately report to the UN Security Council its claim to be acting in self-defense as required by international law? Read the Nicaragua judgment, and dissents, if you wish to understand the complexity of the situation. Furthermore, Article 51 has to be read in the context of other articles of the
Charter, including the requirement that recourse to force be a last resort. Israel could have lifted the blockade, itself widely viewed as unlawful.

To pick and choose among legal rules to support your rigid political positions will impress no one other than those who share those views, which from reading your posts elsewhere are quite extreme.

I am sure Mr. Singer will respond to you but you have made a statement that I would call crazy if someone else had made it: “rockets that cause no casualties will strike many international law
experts as insufficient” to justify invoking the inherent right to self-defense. Do you yourself understand the meaning of what you are saying? I will tell you. You are saying that as long as someone trying to kill you misses, you do not have the right to fire back. You must wait until he kills someone to fire back. You are saying that if one country fires 100 rockets at another country, that country does not have the right to attack its rocket launchers as long as no one is killed. Until that time it must be allowed to continue firing its rockets. You are saying something that no sane person would agree with.

The more I think about this, the more I am astounded by the implications of what you are saying. Forgive me for injecting a human dimension into your tortured legalistic reasoning. Someone aims a gun at my child and pulls the trigger. He misses or the gun misfires. I light a cigarette and wait for him to pull the trigger again, and a third time if necessary, until he kills my child. Then. in the view of “many international law expersts and I take it yourself, I will be permitted to fire back. Is that what you really wish to say?

The analogy doesn’t work. States are regulated by a framework of law that seeks to the extent possible to minimize
the suffering brought about war. It puts the burden on a state to prove that it had no alternative means to defend
itself given the totality of circumstances. The whole effort of international law after World War II was to restrict
the right of sovereign states to claim self-defense on the basis of a variety of subjective consideration. You may
be ‘astounded’ by what I have been writing, but these constraints on self-defense were the work of hardheaded statesmen
not academicians shielded from the realities of world politics. Your argument should be with them, not with me.

It is not really an analogy. This is precisely what happens in war. Human beings try to kill other human beings and these other human beings have the right to defend themselves and prevent it as an organized body. I don’t know of any international law experts other than those with clearly stated political biases like yourself who would deny a country coming under a rocket attack, irrespective of the damage done, the right to return fire. Your logic, once again, would have permitted Hamas to have fired all 3,500 of its rockets without Israel being accorded the right to fire back. Imagine if the United States declared (or did not declare) war on Russia and fired a few nuclear warheads that were intercepted or missed their mark and consequently did no damage. Would you be telling Russia that rockets that cause no casualties are an insufficient cause for Russia to claim the right of self-defense and respond militarily and that they should patiently wait for the next attack. That is the absurdity and that is the insanity.

You are simplifying the context in a typically partisan or one-sided way. If the rockets have consistently caused minimal or no
damage, then it makes the case for some other way of addressing the security concerns of Israel a more responsible course of action for the government to pursue.
There are many reasons to think that the entire security crisis after the kidnapping incident was used by Netanyahu to let the PA
know that there would be a heavy price for seeking a unity government that included Hamas and to divert world attention from settlement
expansion on the West Bank. I am not saying there are not ways for Israel to interpret the context to justify its conduct, but that the
issues are ones of interpretative complexity from the perspective of international law and that Israel seemed more concerned with its political objectives than in enhancing the security of the Israeli people, which many believe are no greater and possible worse than before Protective Edge commenced. Surely, the evidence suggests that Hamas has emerged politically stronger, not only in Gaza but also somewhat surprisingly in the West Bank..

No, I am actually taking a neutral stance and attacking an abstract principle that strikes me as absurd and therefore inconceivable as a principle of law, whether it concerns Hamas attacking Israel or America attacking Russia. You are not really talking about law but about a conflict in which you believe that the Palestinians are entirely right and Israel is entirely wrong and therefore that any military action by Israel must necessarily be wrong, and you are consequently trying to rationalize your bias on quasi-legal grounds. In the end, as always, you fall back on an interpretation of Israel’s motives that is entirely unfounded. What does it mean “there is reason to believe”? You are trying to apply logic in the absence of knowledge and I understand that this logic is essential in building your argument and therefore you will not let go of it even if it has no basis in fact. Israel acted as any other country would have acted under similar circumstances, How was the arrest of Hamas activists going to “divert attention” from anything? It was Hamas that murdered the teenagers and Hamas that started firing the rockets.

I think this piece by Noam Chomsky at today’s TomDispatch should make most people recognize Israel’s true nature vis a vis the Palestinians. Of course the usual hasbarists that appear on this blog will equate Chomsky with their main target of hate, Richard Falk. They would be right about that, but wrong about the truth of what they say.

What does hasbara or hate have to do with Noam Chomski’s fictions? After all, he is getting his information the same way you are and stops looking the moment he gets something he likes without having any way to verify anything he reads:

“Hamas finally reacted [in July] with its first rockets in 18 months, Israeli officials reported, providing Israel with the pretext to launch Operation Protective Edge on July 8th.”

This, for example, is fiction. You can use any source you like and you will discover that Hamas fired around 250 rockets and mortars at Israel in the 18 months before July, including around 65 in June.

“What does hasbara or hate have to do with Noam Chomski’s fictions? After all, he is getting his information the same way you are and stops looking the moment he gets something he likes without having any way to verify anything he reads:

“Hamas finally reacted [in July] with its first rockets in 18 months, Israeli officials reported, providing Israel with the pretext to launch Operation Protective Edge on July 8th.”

This, for example, is fiction. You can use any source you like and you will discover that Hamas fired around 250 rockets and mortars at Israel in the 18 months before July, including around 65 in June.”

You suggested reading Chomsky’s article. Ray 032 was going to post the same link.

No, David, I won’t bother attempting to respond to Fred’s fabricated fictions. Chomsky does a good job of preempting them. Fred just flails at Chomsky in the same way he does Falk – and you and me.

I’ve been reading Chomsky for over 45 years, both the linguistics and American policy behavior. Although his writing can sometimes be a drudge, I have rarely known him to have his facts wrong. His research is impeccable, and his opinions reflect my own.

No one has to think, Gene. Just look at the sources. That;s what people do when they collect evidence. But with all the reading and television watching that you do, don’t you KNOW that Hamas was firing rockets all that time? I was here. I remember it, Where were you? In Zimbabwe?

Throughout June about 62 rockets and 3 mortar shells were launched from Gaza in about 17 attacks towards Israel. These attacks caused property damage, but no deaths. Four were injured as a result of fire started by a rocket launch.[44]
June 1
A rocket was fired early Sunday morning at the Eshkol region. The rocket landed in a field and no casualties were reported. [45]
June 11
A rocket fired from Gaza narrowly missed a main artery in southern Israel as it landed in a nearby dirt field without causing any injuries.[46]
June 14
2 of 3 rockets fired from Gaza fell in the Hof Ashkelon regional council in the afternoon. No injuries or damage were reported.[47]
June 15
In Ashkelon a series of explosions were heard in the evening. 4 rockets were fired from Gaza, 2 of them were intercepted by the Iron Dome. Fragments of the rockets fell across the city. There were no reports of injuries or material damages.[48]
June 16
A rocket from Gaza landed in an open area in the Ashkelon area. No damage or injuries.[49]
June 18
2 rockets fired from Gaza hit into a Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council community and caused light damage to a structure.[50]
June 19
In the evening a rocket was fired from Gaza. It struck an open field near Sderot.[51] Later again a rocket was fired at the city of Ashkelon. It was successfully intercepted by Iron Dome.[52]
June 20
A Color Red siren alerting residents of a rocket launch from Gaza has been sounded in the Hof Ashkelon area, but the rocket didn’t make it outside of the Gaza strip.[53]
June 21
Gaza Militants fired a rocket into direction of Hof Ashkelon Regional Council in southern Israel. No injuries, but damage caused to a road in Hof Ashkelon. In the evening three rockets were fired at the Sdot Negev and Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Councils. All rockets exploded in the open area. No damages or injuries were reported.[54]
June 24
In the early evening Gaza Militants fired several rockets into Southern Israel. Two of the rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome Missile Defense System, as the rockets would have hit inhabited areas. Targets have been Ashkelon and Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council.[55] Again a rocket landed in the South, in the Sdot Negev Regional Council. There were light damage, but no injuries were reported.[56]
June 27
In the morning a mortar shell exploded near the border fence between Gaza and Israel. No one was hurt. A military vehicle operating in the area was lightly damaged.[57] In the evening 6 rockets were launched from the Gaza strip. Sirens were heard in many areas to warn for incoming fire. 4 rockets fell in the open field. 2 were intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system, as these rockets would have landed in populated areas of Ashekelon.[58]
June 28
In the evening several rockets were fired from the Gaza strip. 2 rockets struck an industrial factory in Sderot, causing a fire. No one was hurt from any of the rockets, but the factory was burned to the ground. All other rockets exploded in the open area in Sdot Negev.[59]
June 29
4 rockets were fired from Gaza into the South of Israel in the evening. 2 were intercepted by the Iron Dome. 2 fell in open area near the border fence.[60]
June 30
All night the “Code Red” siren was heard. 16 rockets were launched from Gaza in the early morning hours. Most of the rockets landed in open areas of the Eshkol Regional Council region. Some went down in the Sedot Negev Regional Council community. One rocket caused light damage to a home. No people were thought to have been hurt.[61] In the late night Gaza militants fired a rocket at Israel. The rocket landed in the open field in the Eshkol Regional Council. No injuries or damage were reported.[62]

And here are the references. You can also check out the ISA log, the IDF reports and the Foreign Ministry summary.

Richard, if you think you have civility problems in this Blog, just look at the vitriol between Jewish extremist and Jewish extremist in the comments on this article in Today’s Jerusalem Post:
‘Yuval Rabin: Wrong to blame my father for terror deaths’

Fred, good of you to confirm this fact: “Throughout June about 62 rockets and 3 mortar shells were launched from Gaza in about 17 attacks towards Israel. These attacks caused property damage, but NO DEATHS.

Israel used a sledge hammer in Gaza to hit a gnat! Israel had already displayed to the world it’s ability to kill only only the intended target on the densly populated streets of Gaza. With all the drones constantly in the air over Gaza, both armed and unarmed, the truck firing the rockets could have been target and destroyed without the massive Israeli killing of the civilians and their homes.

No deaths! What a shame! You can work out the odds with your own children, not mine. Would you allow anyone to put a gun to your child’s head if the odds were a million to one against its killing him? If you would, you’re insane.

Fred must hate him? There is so much in it, it will take a lot of reading. It is significant there are so many prominent Jews who have a 180 degree of difference with Fred’s perspective.

This Blog bears record of my perspective addressed to Fred at the beginning of the war on how it would turn out for Israel and my General perception was correct.

Did I understand correctly you had lunch with Richard recently? That must have been interesting. I was disappointed when he stared in Montreal a while back, I couldn’t arrange a lunch. I was born in Montreal.

I have to admit, there may be some Truth in Rabbi Ira’s comment about Fred and his ideological comrades being here.

But the Rabbi is also presumptions to imply this Blog is the centre of the lives of those who do not share the ideological rigidity of Fred and his comrades.

Welcome back Rabbi! Shalom!

Being a Rabbi, why do you not share your Spiritual insights into what is unfolding in this material world?

Thank you for now conceding Israel has an inherent right to self defence.

That is a far cry from your earlier comment:

“The ‘inherent right of self-defense’ is notoriously contested by law experts with different viewpoints.”

You are entitled to take the view that there were no circumstances that existed for Israel to exercise its right of self defence – as I am to say there were.

But to suggest as you did that Israel might not possess such a right because such a right was “notoriously contested by law experts” was very misleading and in my opinion was designed to denigrate and delegitimise Israel.

I am still waiting for you to furnish those expert opinions claiming Israel is in occupation of Gaza and Area A and Area B.

I am still waiting for you to refute my criticisms of your reasons for claiming Israel is a “special case” requiring special scrutiny in the media.

One further matter.

You state:

” Israel could have lifted the blockade, itself widely viewed as unlawful”

That was not the opinion of the Palmer Commission which concluded:

“The fundamental principle of the freedom of navigation on the high seas is
subject to only certain limited exceptions under international law. Israel faces
a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza. The naval blockade
was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons
from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the
requirements of international law.”

Why claim the blockade is “widely viewed as unlawful” – when you must surely know Palmer said exactly the opposite after considering all the facts.

This is what I understand that it is: Arabs give the territory of Holy Land back to the spiritual authority of Old Testament and all Jewish-exiles — not just “Arab-line-Israel” — so to say.

I am sure that they are second order issues and not central issues that are ugly — but things get ugly when we do not focus on the validity of the Sacred Texts and spiritual authority of (first order to all things).

In my own spirit / mind — I mean what Israel as a “state” does to Arabs make me nauseous — but Scripture and Spirit confirm the consequences to stubbornness when comes to the Holy Land, instead — not moral laws (my own spirit / mind) but Spiritual Laws /Law of the Spirit. I am very sorry about that — the Law of the Spirit nullify my spirit and law of my mind — all of it.

Is definitely some stomach-turning killing in Holy Land — but how do we interpret all of that, in reality? What exactly is it and why?

In our minds, we can be convinced that we are not wrong based on moral law, and be entirely and dead-end inaccurate on the base of Laws that are Spiritual, as a core issue to the issue.

Holy Land is under spiritual authority of the Law and Law of the Spirit — so both are active. It is like double edged sword to the issues: the blessing and the curse.

I do understand mercy and love of God, but I understand the wrath of God and wrath of the cup that God administrates.

Look at the Scripture–I think the prophets– Look there about “wrath of the cup.” (“Wrath of the Blood?”)

“For being quiet and non violent, Israel took even more land and now wants to make Hebrew the only official language in Israel.”

David, you write:

“If Israel decides to make Hebrew the only official language in Israel – it will happen as a result of a democratic vote in the Parliament. I personally would not agree with such a decision and would work to democratically change it – respecting nevertheless the right of the majority view to make it.”

I read this and I had no reflection about it. However, then, I started to have brain-storming.

This is what I understand:

If Israel establishes Hebrew as primarily language, it is for future and spiritual purposes due to Jewish-Exiles, and due to the authenticity of the reading and interpreting of the sacred texts to the population.

Arabic, nevertheless will be another important official language, which is supported in the educational system (however both of these two languages are equally unique and separate to the spiritual needs of Israeli population: future point in time).

Hebrew is authentic to a nation, and so it should be preserved as it is passed on by the nation, and equally important would be Arabic to a nation–and as a language to the Jews and Arabs (as nations Jewish /exiles-Jewish) it is important to integrate and to preserve.

With that, you not just debate some languages like English and Spanish, in essence –but the language in which original Sacred Texts is written, and due to spiritual needs of the population in now and some future point in time.

Right now they are OK – but there will be a shift that has to be watched on. You cannot just have something like English universal and mess up your universal interpretations of Original Texts—to be spiritually excommunicated, in essence, like forever?

I think we are agreed that elections need to be held under international supervision as soon as possible.

Does that guarantee there would be no complaints about any election being rigged? Probably not. Claims of rigging seem to dominate most elections – even if the international supervisors say they were fair

On the right of prisoners held in Israel to vote – my preference is to allow them to do so – although there are many precedents world wide to the contrary – usually based on the length of the sentence.

Could voters elect a prisoner? In my opinion they can.

I think however these are side issues. I would estimate there might be about two million voters in Gaza and the West Bank who need to be given a say on who rules them and 7000 prisoners.

Those two million voters must be allowed a say – more of the same or a change of direction.

You write,” I think we are agreed that elections need to be held under international supervision as soon as possible.” Yes, you are correct about that – it is not debatable what you have said here, and I agree with you.

Other things (side issues) that you write about, I do agree on that are optional and /or debatable, and perhaps may even not be debatable. It is by the substance of the situation, in essence (I think).

I only have spiritual accountability to the Book of Prophesy in Church age, according to the teaching of Apostle Paul. What Hamas does to their self-defense, as part of legitimately elected government – I have no spiritual authority over – they are Exile Jews in Holy Land and Gaza, and all territory is legitimately theirs – but without heresy, and under the Spiritual authority of Old Testament.

With that, speak to David, who actually has a legitimate spiritual authority over Hamas by the Old Testament as Jewish-Exile.

I do however have spiritual authority over those who are Psychopaths among Hamas, and they could be legitimately accused of war-crimes—but that are one and same situation with individuals that are Psychopaths within Israeli state-government that are up to their ears into the war-crimes…

Look: I only look in terms of human condition in the law of the sin, human condition in the law of the conscience and human condition that is sealed in Satanic seals and/or Blasphemy of God’s Spirit (generational /personal, and often permanent/irrevocable). As Church Charismatic and ordained in Church Catholic as a woman—I can tell you about sins of others, even yours – if you will. I am not the priest-Charismatic of Church Roman Catholic, who is sealed into silence when comes to the sins of accursed human race. Accursed human race needs God and Baptism in God’s Spirit to be undone of irrevocable sins.

Point out any individual within any of those two legitimate governments and I can see to study them and tell you if they are Psychopaths –or not.

But wait! – The recent conflict was started by individual psychopath that resided in Gaza and did who knows what…and Israeli Psychopaths took a civil crime as a opportunity to practice the guilt of blood, and illegitimately against the Law and the Law of God’s Spirit add on to the territory that is not in their spiritual authority as Non-Jewish tribes /nations (under Judaism) in Holy Land – now, I do have spiritual accountability by the authority by Old Testament and by the Gospel over Non-Jews (under Judaism) in Holy Land, and what Judaism they do practice will be my concern, as well. I do not like heresies by the Law of the Spirit…

Look, I have had enough of your one-sided and unbalanced interpretation of the issues, and the wrath of God’s Spirit just resting with me that I am not sure when God moves me into the rite of Church-Charismatic judgment unless I get imminent interpretation by the Spirit what I say by Spirit.

If you want discern things and look at the thing that is fine, but please do not come with some nonsense that is against the Law of the Spirit. When you are immature you are best of to mind your own business when comes to the dealing with peoples that are ecclesiastical, in essence, Jews-exile and Jewish Diaspora in Holy Land and Gaza: Hamas. I can tell you about right of Hamas, and without error – what do you want? You want me to foster some oppression against them? That will not happen because I am under the Law of God’s Spirit. You are not – what is wrong with you? They are priestly Kingdom that is under very bad spiritual and the natural attack.

Receive this as a kind note, for I personally, never will to feel resentment toward anyone. I am ordained and it is in conflict with my free will.

“During the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza this same atmosphere in Washington produced a resolution with 100% backing expressing unreserved support for Israel’s right to defend itself. In polarized America to find such unanimity confirms above all the undeniable success of pro-Israel forces…”
Actually, this confirms that Americans see through the thin veneer of ‘leftist liberator’ spread over Hamas by people like you. Americans can see that Hamas is a right wing, fascist, hate group. We can recognize that violent people in hoods preaching genocide are the bad guys. In addition, blaming invisible conspiracies for problems you’ve created may indicate a mental health issue.

I did not know the Israelis would stoop so low to make life even more difficult for Palestinians in East Jerusalem until I saw this report Today. Is this one more Israeli tactic to compel Palestinians to self-deport?

Well, Prof. Falk, I made a certain point about Israel hatred that speaks directly to your “second kind” of “alleged” antisemitism and I can understand why you chose not to respond to it:

“Nowhere on the face of the earth will you find a country that has been unremittingly attacked in the language used to attack Israel, or at all – not truly genocidal nations like Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Serbia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Turkey; not the world’s worst violators of human rights like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Somalia, Russia, China, North Korea and Cuba; not seizers and occupiers of land like Russia, Armenia, Turkey (Northern Cyprus), Morocco and Azerbaizhan. Where are the BDS movements, Prof. Falk? Where are the blogs? Where are the armies of blog crawlers? Where are the videos? Where are the links? What do you think it is that draws all these “critics” to Israel and nowhere else?”

Actually, while traveling I tried to respond, and thanked you for a thoughtful presentation of your views.

On this point that you think that I was unwilling to respond, I did try to explain along the following lines:
Israel is a special case for at least three reasons: –its legitimacy was established by UN and League initiatives
without any effort to take into account the views of the population physically present in the country; –the US as
the world’s self-appointed global leader has singled out Israel for the most massive financial assistance over a period
of many years, and has lent controversial support to Israel to shield it from censure by the UN;–Israel itself claims to
be the only democracy in the Middle East and otherwise posits itself as a shining example even extending to the boast that
the IDF is the most moral army in the world. These three reasons explain and justify the attention given to Israel’s alleged
wrongdoing. Beyond this, the fact that worse offenders are not scrutinized to the same extent as Israel is more an argument
for according more attention to such offenders. It is not excuse for Israel’s behavior. Whether we like it or not the Israel-
Palestine conflict has become the litmus test of international morality ever since the collapse of apartheid in South Africa.

I did not present this list to excuse anything Israel may or may not be guilty of but to address the subject of your post, namely the contention by Israel’s supporters that along with the legitimate criticism there is an entire class of critcs, exposed by the terms and vehemence of their language and their dedication to the vilification of Israel, who can justifiably be called Israel haters and in this sense my comment speaks for itself.

I think Fred is being a bit disingenuous here. I do not agree that those who criticize Israel on this blog are all “Israel haters”. There are strong reasons for criticizing Israel, and to compare that criticism to the lack of criticism for other states who commit human rights violations is a red herring. One can find such criticism every day, both, in the MSM and on other websites all over the internet. To single out Richard is to dismiss his role as a specialist on the subject given his recent official assignment to report on human rights violations in the occupied territories. Fred has every right to disagree with Richards positions, but to accuse him bias and hatred of Israel is unjust. As far as I am concerned, Fred’s own biases in defense of Israel’s crimes are worse.

And to continue, if I may. The reasons you enumerate for the attention Israel receives strike me more as rationalizations than genuine motivations. I doubt very much if Israel’s status as a democracy or the claims for its army’s morality or American aid are really what draws fire. At the most it fuels existing resentment and hostility. As for the manner in which Israel was created, any reasonable person would acknowledge that the Jews had a valid claim to sovereignty in the Land of Israel. As the Arabs also had a claim, a compromise was proposed. It would be untrue to say the the Arabs were not consulted. The plan was presented to them and they rejected it. The question then became whether the Arabs should have been accorded the power of veto over the partition plan. The UN didn’t think so. I don’t think so. And I can’t see on what grounds Israel’s critics think so.

Former US presidential candidate and long-time congressman, Ron Paul, who has been accused of loving Jews but hating Israel by the organized Jewry, has denied the “official story” of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Last week, in a breaking interview Ron Paul told Charles Goyette, host of podcast ‘Money and Markets’ that Bush administration had the pre-knowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“I believe if we ever get the full truth, we will find out that over government had it in the records exactly what the plan were, or at least close to it,” Ron Paul said.

On September 3, 2014, Stewart Ain reported at the New York Jewish week that pro-Israel Jewish group Simon Wiesenthal Center has called upon the Cornell University to close down its medical campus in Qatar for latter’s support for the Gaza ruling Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

I can relate to the suffering of these Palestinian war refugees returning to their destroyed homes near the Israeli border.

What is disturbing is the cold heartedness of the commentators, devoid of any common humanity.

‘Haunted by war, Gaza residents try to rebuild’

KHAN YUNIS, Gaza Strip — The war in Gaza is over, but the approximately 10,000 residents of Khuza’a do not yet believe it. The sound of reconnaissance aircraft flying nearby continues to make them think of death.

On September 1, 2014, South African-born British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis addressed a crowd of 1000 Jews gathered in front of the Royal Court of Justice in London. He claimed that the pro-Gaza rallies are new ways of showing “anti-Semitism”.

Not Literary they are killing civilians, but Hamas? – as they literary want to stop Hamas, and actually don’t by anything else then stopping rockets…but why the killing of civilians, instead?

To stop Hamas is to stop them by targeting specific areas? How and why?

I do not think that I am twisting anything here…

What is their strategy? Stop the rockets and kill Hamas—or stop rockets and kill civilians—get as many rubble’s as you can so that be easier to move on into desired areas – as civilians are not going to hang out in the rubble’s?

Is it not Israelis strategy in effect?
If not what then?

For every areas/ town that Israel blows up they get sanctions that are appropriate.

Build luxurious refugee camps– just next to these rubbles, the population stays.

Dear Mr Falk,
Uri Avnery’s recent article on ISIS and the spread of religious zealotry reminds me of 2 things: the unfortunate growth in recent decades of Christian fundamentalism in the US, and the evident change in Chechnya from what was originally a largely secular independence movement. It seemed to me that the Chechens, abandoned to their fate by the outside world, as Clinton buddied up to a drunken murderer named Yeltsin, they had nowhere else to go but to Taliban training camps, where an admission prerequisite was a religious oath. Best regards – B.O.

I get dozens of news alerts in my inbox daily. This one written by a Jewish American, is interesting. He basically confirms some info in what Fred calls my “rant.” I never heard of him until after I posted my “rant” but I’m sure Fred will think Stephen Lendman is another self-hating Jew.

“Last April, Fatah and Hamas agreed on establishing unity Palestinian governance. Hamas official Izzat Ar-Rishiq said issues separating both sides were resolved. Fatah confirmed the report. Both sides agreed to form a “government of independents.” It would be “tasked with preparing for presidential and legislative elections within a year.”

PLC deputy head Dr. Ahmad Bahar called the agreement historic. Gaza’s coalition of independent figures head Abdul-Aziz Shiqaqi said it breaks new ground. It offers reconciliation hope. Earlier unity talks failed. Israel sabotaged them. In April 2011, both sides met in Cairo. They announced a draft reconciliation agreement.

Egypt’s official MENA news agency reported “a complete understanding after talks on all the points, including the formation of a transitional government with a specific mandate and setting a date for elections.” Hamas official Izzat Ar-Rishiq said differing issues between both sides were resolved.

Fatah’s delegation head, Azzam Al-Ahmad, confirmed it. Both sides agreed on unity governance, he said. They’ll be “tasked with preparing for presidential and legislative elections within a year.”

Reconciliation didn’t follow. Agreed on terms were ignored. A similar Doha 2012 agreement followed. Announced national unity governance wasn’t consummated.

Netanyahu reacted as expected. He demanded Abbas “choose between peace with Israel or peace with Hamas.” “There cannot be peace with both because Hamas strives to destroy the state of Israel and says so openly,” he said. “I think that the very idea of reconciliation shows the weakness of the Palestinian Authority and creates the prospect that Hamas could retake control of Judea and Samaria just like it took control of the Gaza Strip.”

Abbas is a longtime Israeli collaborator. He’s a Palestinian Judas. His interest in unity is pretense. He’s Israel’s enforcer. He denies Palestinians legitimate governance. It was just a matter of time before hoped for unity faded. It was fantasy from inception. It was dead on arrival. Its obituary remained to be written………………………………………………”

I get dozens of news alerts in my inbox daily. This one written by a Jewish American, is interesting. He basically confirms some info in what Fred calls my “rant.” I never heard of him until after I posted my “rant” but I’m sure Fred will think Stephen Lendman is another self-hating Jew.

Excellent commentary although I disagree with your apparent claim that Jews are a unique people. There is NOTHING unique to Jews other than their choice of religious rituals to follow. People claiming to be half (or whatever Percentage) Jewish drive me crazy. It is impossible to inherit religious beliefs. As nearly as we can tell, ALL Babies are born with NO religious belief, ergo everyone is born atheist. I digress, the point of my posting is to point out that Jews are not Zionists. primarily because one of the most common LIES zionists tell is that zionists are Jews and opposition to zionism is “anti semitic.”

The late Jerry Falwell, Christian preacher, claimed there were over 70 million Christian zionists. hence Israel’s political support.

Apparently a perfect illustration of the toxic conflation of the two types of anti-Semitism that has caused great harm
to persons of good will that identify with the ordeal of the Palestinian people and object to the behavior of a sovereign
state that is abusing its power.

[…] An American Jewish academic and diplomat, Dr. Richard Falk wrote on September 1 that there are two types of anti-Semitism; when Jews are hated based on religion and ethnicity, which is pure racism, and hating Jews for […]

[…] and great efforts to deflecting blame for its policies and practices by raising the black flag of antisemitism to discredit responsible and deserved criticism,” Richard Falk, American Jewish academic […]

[…] Sharansky is founder of the Global Forum on Antisemitism, an organization seeking to push forward a new understanding of anti-Semitism, which sees hostility toward the state of Israel as hostility to the Jewish people as a […]

[…] Sharansky is founder of the Global Forum on Antisemitism, an organization seeking to push forward a new understanding of anti-Semitism, which sees hostility toward the state of Israel as hostility to the Jewish people as a […]

Richard Falk

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He initiated this blog partly in celebration of his 80th birthday.